KNOCK ON ANY DOOR

CLEARANCE MAP 1938/39

www.tarnerhistory.org www.bucfp.org

Writer in Residence Bridget Whelan ISBN: 978-0-9569563-2-3 Published by LMNOP Books Designed by LMNOP Studios 17 Montpelier Place, Brighton, BN1 3BF. 01273 911 288. www.lmnopstudios.com

© Tarner History 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission of the copyright holder.

KNOCK ON ANY DOOR TARNER : A BRIGHTON NEIGHBOURHOOD REMEMBERED, RECORDED AND RECREATED Dedicated to Judy Simon and Valerie Mainstone, who have worked for the people of Tarner for many years.

In memory of Paul Doyle, who died while this book was in production.

>

Page 3

INTRODUCTION

Brighton Unemployed Centre Families Project is a community centre that offers services and support to the unwaged and low waged in the whole of Brighton and Hove but based, and very much rooted in, the local area, known (sometimes) as Tarner or Carlton Hill or Albion Hill.

In 2009 volunteers suggested we should start collecting the memories and experiences of the local community.

That initial idea evolved into an investigation into the clearances and demolition of the Tarner area, capturing the memories of the participants, and providing an understanding of how Brighton has developed. This book and the website we have created are a record of the untold history of a place and a people on the edge of one of England’s most vibrant cities.

The ambiguity about the very name of the area is indicative of a changing community identity. The construction of this part of the city started around 1800 when the Prince Regent’s occupation began the gentrification of central Brighton. Buildings were erected speculatively, built of the cheapest materials.

Dense, poor quality housing developed as the town’s

Knock on Any Door > Introduction

population soared. The endemic overcrowding, inadequate sanitation and lack of water supply meant that the area;

‘degenerated into appalling slums... notorious for the deprivation of their inhabitants’ Encyclopaedia of Brighton

The Greenwood Act of 1930 offered subsidies to tackle slums through demolition and so the wholesale destruction of housing began. The populace either moved into flats erected on the site of the demolished slums – Milner and Kingswood, for example – or were moved to newly constructed estates on the edges of East Brighton – Whitehawk and Moulsecoomb. The current and persistent reputation of those new estates (undeserved, as anyone who spent time actually visiting the homes would see) is of violent, run-down, uncared for streets – slums, in other words.

Two questions were immediately established for the project. Firstly, what exactly was the Tarner area? How should it be defined? Secondly, and more importantly, how did this distinct patchwork of small districts evolve within Brighton and Hove, itself a pocket-sized city of barely a quarter of a million people. Is it possible that the reputation of ‘the appalling slum’ of Tarner moved with the residents bulldozed out between 1930 to 1960, to Whitehawk and Moulsecoomb? And what remained of the community left behind?

With the help of the Heritage Lottery Fund, the project, tentatively named ‘slum stories: migration and demonisation in Brighton’ began, moved forward by a magnificent group of volunteers. The first question – what is the Tarner area – was eventually agreed by the project team after studying maps, parish boundaries and council records. The project focussed on a district bounded by Hanover, Queen’s Park, St James’s Street and the Old Steine, as shown in the map on page 196 During the period covered by the interviewees in this book, these streets were still a warren of little roads packed with ‘two-up and two-down rat-infested slum

houses’ as Molly Grace describes it in the chapter on community, with a vigorous culture of its own.

The transcripts here give a fantastic picture of life in Tarner: rats coming down the chimney, barrow-boys fighting, of the lampman, Mr Chalmers, injured during World War I with ‘a pedal on his bike which was higher than the other, because he had one leg shorter than the other.’ Young boys sitting in a classroom, goggle-eyed with the headmistress in front of them, her legs spread, ‘showing her fearnoughts, her passion-killers with us sat on the floor looking up.’ And what happened to ‘the Pompey mob and the Brighton mob – all knocker boys, all villains, double-dyed villains?’ This is a book full of wonders, beautifully true even when the truth is quite grim and harsh.

And what is left behind now, in Tarner, after the wave of slum clearances? This super output area (a statistical government catergorisation of England) next to Brighton Unemployed Centre Families Project ranks 307 in the 2010 National Indices of Deprivation, out of 32,482 areas, one being the most deprived. It ranks 20 in terms of health deprivation and disability.This means it is more deprived than virtually anywhere else in the entire country.

A 2008 national report that measured the mental health of adults up to the age of 60 who were suffering from mood and anxiety disorders stated that Tarner ranked first. Despite this someone walking 400 yards down the hill from BUCFP would find themselves shopping in that ‘cosmopolitan mix of unusual, often unique, sometimes wacky shops and watering holes’ as described in the North Laine website. Walk a mile or so further to reach Dyke Road, an area of some 1,400 households that is amongst the five per cent most affluent places in the country.

Brighton and Hove Council’s statistics office can provide a map with the following characteristic: draw a line from Swansea, through Birmingham to Hull, and in this area beneath the line, encompassing all of

the south of England and most of the Midlands, the highest proportion of young adults not in education, employment or training (NEETs in the jargon) is in Brighton. Even without putting on rose-tinted glasses to view the past – impossible reading the words in this book – it would be difficult to argue that the wholesale clearances in the middle of the last century were a resounding success.

Do the memories in this book answer the second question of how this area evolved? Once a place (and its populace) is labelled as deprived, slum-like, violent, does that marking persist, actually move with the people, wherever they may go? Maybe those with a deep understanding of the dynamics of demonisation, the naming and shaming of the poor in money, will be able to analyse these stories to provide an answer.

All those involved in this work’s production – most notably interviewees and volunteers – are thanked and celebrated elsewhere. But this introduction must highlight the contribution of two exceptional people, indefatigable workers for the centre, the community of Tarner, and for the people of Brighton and Hove:Valerie Mainstone and Judy Simon. Without their support, commitment, enthusiasm and, above all, the principles for which they fight, this book, and perhaps the centre itself, would not exist. This book is dedicated to Valerie and Judy.

Peter Sutcliffe Education Worker BUCFP www.tarnerhistory.org April 2012

>

Page 5

CONTENTS

TIMELINE

> 08

GLANCING BACK

> 16

COMMUNITY

> 24

FAMILY

> 70

SHOPS & STREET TRADERS

> 97

Knock on Any Door > Contents

WAR

> 115

WORKING LIVES

> 141

EDUCATION

> 163

HOLIDAYS, HOP-PICKING & HIGH COCKALORUM

> 177

THE TARNER WALK & TOUR

> 197

BIOGRAPHIES OF ORAL HISTORY CONTRIBUTORS

> 203

THE MAKING OF THE TARNER HISTORY PROJECT

> 208

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

> 211

BIBLIOGRAPHY

> 213

Chapter Headers by Chloe Howley

>

Page 7

TARNER TIMELINE

1930s

1900s > > > > > > > > >

1901 1901 1901 1902 1907 1909 1911 1914 1916

> > > >

1918 1918 1918 1918

Introduction of trams to Brighton Brighton and Hove Albion Football Club opens Queen Victoria dies Boer War ends First permanent cinema in Western Road, Brighton Old Age Pension introduced for over 70s Unemployment benefit introduced World War I begins Conscription begins for 18 to 40 year olds. Age eventually rises to 51 World War I ends Vote for women over 30 First woman MP elected The school leaving age is raised to 14

1920s > > > > > > > > > > > >

1920 – 1924 South Moulsecoomb estate built 1921 Unemployment benefits include allowances for wives 1922 The BBC is founded 1923 – 1926 Queen’s Park estate built 1925 Brighton boating pool opens 1926 – 1930 North Moulsecoomb built 1926 General Strike 1927 – 1934 Whitehawk estate built 1927 Brighton Boys Club opens on St James’s Street 1928 Women gain right to vote on the same basis as men 1929 Wall Street Crash 1929 Brighton Boys Club opened by the Prince of Wales

Knock on Any Door > Timeline

> > > > >

> > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > > >

1930 Workhouses abolished. Brighton Workhouse in Elm Grove becomes Brighton Municipal Hospital 1930 Shoreham airport starts scheduled passenger flights 1930 First phase of Bevendean built 1930 Richmond Hill demolished 1931 Tarner Estate built on parts of Richmond and Sussex Streets: Elmore and Tarner Road are built on fields that had been used for grazing 1932 Unemployment reaches 22.8% nationally 1933 The Astoria cinema opens 1933 Letitia Tilbury Tarner dies 1933 The Astoria Cinema opens on Gloucester Place 1934 – 1935 Brighton Dome redesigned as town’s main conference and entertainment hall 1934 Milner flats built – the first by Brighton Corporation 1934 Brighton trunk murders 1935 Tarner Home opens 1935 Tarnerland nursery school opens 1936 – 1939 Spanish Civil war 1936 Woburn Place and Nelson Row demolished 1936 Prior House, Tilbury Place built as the Brighton Girls Club 1937 – 1940 First phase of East Moulsecoomb built 1937 Saltdean Lido opens 1937 Market opens on Circus Street 1938 Kingswood flats built 1938 Brighton Rock by Graham Greene published.

1939 World War II begins 1939 Rationing begins 1939 Trams replaced with trolley buses

1940s > > > > > > > > > > > > > >

1940 Brighton beach closed 1940 7,000 evacuees leave Brighton 1940 Odeon cinema in St George’s Road, Kemptown takes a direct hit. 52 killed on bombing raid.

1940 White Street bombed 1941 Conscription for women 1943 Ivory Place childrens’ clinic bombed 1944 Free Secondary Education Act passed 1945 World War II ends 1945 General election: landslide Labour victory 1946 First family allowance paid – a universal benefit paid to the mother regardless of family income 1947 School leaving age raised to 15 1948 NHS founded 1948 Brighton Municipal Hospital renamed Brighton General Hospital 1948 – 1960 National Service. All men between 17 – 21 conscripted into the Armed Forces

1970s > > > > >

> > >

> > >

>

1953 Queen’s Coronation 1954 Rationing ends 1959 Cambridge Street; Claremont Place; Richmond Buildings demolished.

1960s > > > > > > >

1960 – 1965 High rise flats on Aston Rise, Grove Hill and Richmond Parade built 1960 Carlton Place; Dorset Buildings demolished 1962 Sussex University founded 1962 Devonshire Terrace demolished 1963 Carlton Hill school opens 1965 Churchill Square built 1966 Original Ebenezer Chapel on Richmond St demolished 1967 Colour TV introduced

1981 Brighton Workers Centre for the Unemployed opens 1984 IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel targeting Margaret Thatcher 1984 Brighton Workers Centre for The Unemployed changes its name to Brighton Unemployed Centre 1985 Brighton Unemployed Centre moves to Tilbury Place 1986 First paid worker at Brighton Unemployed Centre thanks to Council grant 1987 The October hurricane causes widespread damage, many ancient elms uprooted

1990s > >

>

Chates Court Flats built Equal Pay and Sexual Discrimination Act introduced Whitehawk estate re-built Equal Opportunities Act introduced American Express building erected

1980s

> >

1950s

1970 1975 1975 1976 1977

1994 BUCFP becomes a registered charity 1997 Tarner Home closes and becomes part of the Martlets Hospice

2000s > > >

2000 Brighton becomes a city 2005 Jubilee Library opens 2010 – 2012 Amex the biggest private employer in Brighton builds new European HQ for American Express between Carlton Hill and John Street Photos: Jess Huffman / Chloe Howley / Cathy Cullen

>

Page 9

Tarner 2012 / Chloe Howley

Knock on Any Door > Tarner Streets

> Page 11

Carlton Hill / Tarner 2011 / 2012 / Jess Huffman

Knock on Any Door > Tarner Streets

Tarner 2011 / 2012 / Jess Huffman / Vienna Huffman / Cathy Cullen

> Page 13

>

GLANCING BACK >

Despite its good looks and its closeness to Regency splendour, St John’s Lodge would probably never have been considered a good buy by a savvy 19th century property investor. Workshops and small artisan dwellings were already creeping up the hillside when it was first built, slotting in behind the more expensive houses facing Victoria Gardens, and creating a densely populated working class community.

GLANCING BACK To understand the Tarner community more fully, this section looks back at the history of two local families – and in particular the women of those families. It’s a gapfilled history, created from scanty records, brought to life by memories of residents and a descendant’s ability to imagine walking in the footsteps of her great great great grandmother.

St John’s Lodge, an elegant listed building hidden behind flint walls, sits high on Carlton Hill on the corner of Tilbury Place. It is now a few yards from the European Headquarters of American Express – Brighton’s largest private employer – and Brighton Unemployed Centre Families Project, the community centre where the idea behind creating a history of Tarner first took root.

The house was built for the gentry and its upper stories must once have had commanding views of both the sea and the Pavilion – a royal residence when the lodge’s yellow brick walls were new and smelt of plaster.

Carlton Hill was named after the Prince Regent’s London home and in the opening decades of the 19th century a number of speculative builders – including a Court musician – were slowly developing the slopes.

Knock on Any Door > Glancing Back

The life of the lodge and the life of the streets were only separated by high walls, a large garden and an attitude of mind.

THE LOVELY LADY IN BLACK: MISS TARNER Miss Letitia Tilbury Tarner was the last of her family to live at the lodge and her long life spanned nearly a century of change. Born a few months before the very first train thundered into Brighton station, she grew up at the very beginning of the Victorian era, lived to hear that Hitler had taken power in Germany and died in a time of transatlantic air flights.

Born in London in 1841, Letitia appeared as a baby in the first census ever conducted in Britain. Her parents were a prosperous couple, both of independent means, both aged 30. The head of the household was her grandfather – her mother’s father – 65-year-old Edward Tilbury.

Grandfather Tilbury already owned St John’s Lodge or, as it was known at the time, No. 1 Patriot Place – the old name for Tilbury Place – and his name appeared among the ‘resident nobility, clergy and gentry’ in Leppard & Co’s Brighton Directory for 1839-40. Seven years earlier he had been named as the surveyor of All Souls, a church on Eastern Road, opposite Park Street, that was built specifically for the poor. In most churches at the time worshippers were expected to pay pew rent every week and All Souls was unusual in having so many free seats. There still exists a charity called the Letitia Tilbury Tarner and Lord Haddo Trust that gives grants for religious education, which may well have been set up as a way of remembering his work.

Letitia’s father Edwin Tarner appears to have been a shipping merchant based in both London and Brighton.

Legend says he built the tower in his garden – now Tarner Park – to watch out for his ships in the Channel.

Once sighted he would ride to the London docks to oversee their unloading.

It seems that Letitia and her brothers and sisters lived in London for most of their young adult life – at least they are there every time the census was taken. Only one brother is ever recorded in the census returns as having an occupation which could mean that he was employed in his father’s import/export business.

Letitia’s occupation is either left blank, or it is made clear that she is a woman of ‘means’. From 1881 when Letitia is 40, she and her other unmarried brothers and sisters appear to have taken up permanent residence at St John’s Lodge.

didn’t socialise very much, they would have needed some form of transport – it is hard to imagine them walking up and down Carlton Hill very often. That means a chauffeur if they had a car, or a groom if they still kept a horse and carriage. The Tarner household wasn’t unusual and at the beginning of the Edwardian era in 1901 it was calculated that over 1.5 million people in England were employed in domestic service.

It continued to be a major form of employment until World War II, especially for women.

Life as a servant was physically demanding and it’s striking that relatively elderly women are looking after the relatively elderly Tarners: in the house’s pecking order 69 year old Laura and 63 year old Eliza are only just above Herbert the page. Regardless of who did what, four women and a boy had a household to run (Jessie the nurse probably didn’t get involved in that side of things) and that meant beds had to be made, The most recent census records available are from fireplaces cleaned, ashes removed, grates polished, coal 1911. Three of the Tarner family were living at St John’s hauled up from the cellar and fresh fires lit. Floors were Lodge at that time: older brother Edwin, younger sister scrubbed on hands and knees, rooms dusted, silver Clara and Letitia herself, now 70 years old. It was a polished, carpets beaten, and then came the mountain wealthy household, but it was also a crowded one – the of clothes and linen to be soaked, washed, rinsed, Tarners were outnumbered two-to-one by their servants. wrung out, dried, ironed and aired, not to mention the provisions that had to be ordered, the meals planned, Servants living in St John’s Lodge recorded in the 1911 prepared, cooked, served and washed up.The list goes on.

Census: At 69 Laura was still too young to claim the meagre Laura Willis single aged 69 housemaid born in old aged pension – that it existed at all was still a novelty as the very first payment was made just two Wells, Somerset years earlier in 1909. Eliza couldn’t claim a widow’s Eliza Allen widow aged 63 maid born in Brighton pension because it wouldn’t be introduced for another Alice Boyce single aged 48 cook born in Brighton Emma Nutley single aged 40 parlour maid born in 14 years. When they were no longer able to carry out their duties, Brighton Workhouse in Elm Grove, sitting Brighton Jessie Moore single aged 33 trained nurse born in above the town like a threat, would probably have been their next and last home.

Wellingborough, Northamptonshire Herbert Koley single aged 15 page born in Childs We don’t know what happened to Laura and Eliza, but Hill, Surrey Miss Tarner lived for over 20 years after this census.

This is only a list of the live-in staff. There would also At her death at the age of 92 she not only owned St have been at least one gardener to look after their acre John’s Lodge, but also (according to solicitor’s records and a half of lawn and flower beds. Even if the Tarners deposited at the East Sussex Records office in Lewes) the terrace of houses in Tilbury Place and property

> Page 17

in Sussex Street, Carlton Hill, Mighell Street, Lennox Street and Marine View.

Her legacy to Brighton was Tarner Home, established to provide care to the terminally ill in St John’s Lodge and the adjacent terrace. Her large garden was eventually transformed into Tarner Park.

She lives on in the name of the area and in the memory of local residents. GLADYS EPPS lived in Mighell Street, opposite Miss Tarner’s house.

It was quite a poor neighourhood…I went to St John’s School, quite a poor school.

When I was in senior school when I was about 12 years old Miss Tarner was brought to our school every year. I can remember her so clearly…I took her to be blind or partially blind, a little old lady in black…with what you might call a lady in waiting and they got on the teacher’s desk and called the register, she wasn’t calling it, her assistant was calling, but she nodded each time and you sort of got the impression she was calling it….

We got very, very excited about her coming… because she lived in the neighbourhood, she lived in the big house across the street, and you never saw her, never saw her at all. A big car very occasionally used to come up Mighell Street, a very big, old car, and rumour in the street had it that Miss Tarner was in there but we never saw her.

Also once a year we had school sports at Preston Park and once a year whoever was going in for the sports was allowed to go into the grounds of her place. It was such a treat. I was always a runner. I was allowed to race. I don’t think she watched us but she opened her grounds to us once a year.

There was a church lady called Sister Peg who was very close to her and very close to our school. She lived in one of the houses of hers on the other side of the big house.

(Miss Tarner) fascinated me…more so since I moved away. How marvellous it was that Miss Tarner’s estate all shut up, all locked up, yet you never saw boys

Knock on Any Door > Glancing Back

trying to climb up or anything...she was respected, very respected…and yet this was a poor, working class district.

DENNIS SMITH can still picture her.

She had long black clothes and a hat with a bit of a veil over it and she was blind. She used to come once a month to read the registers in the school and she used to stand there and the teacher would whisper the names to her and then she would call out the name to us and we would say ‘Yes Miss Tarner’.

She had a lot of servants in that place and I think they must have pulled her around.

FRED RICHARDSON also remembers Miss Tarner.

She used to come down to Circus Street School.

She was a lovely, lovely woman. And then she gave them that home, Tarner’s Home… all the incurables used to be at Lady Tarner’s place…

No Strangers to Hard Work: the Pattersons of Woburn Place

By Valerie Mainstone Ellen Patterson was born about 1830, probably at 3 Woburn Place, a small street off Carlton Hill, just a couple of hundred yards from Miss Tarner’s home.

The street was demolished as part of the 1930s slum clearance and the site is now a car park at the side of Milner Flats.

Her father was James Patterson, a plasterer, and her mother Harriett nee Johnson was recorded in the 1851 census as a washerwoman at a time when it was unusual for married women to have their work recorded in the same way as male members of the household. If the 1851 record is correct, Ellen’s sister Mary Ann was born around 1825 when their mother was 17 and from

Tarner 2011 / Jess Huffman

> Page 19

Milner Flats 2012 / Chloe Howley

Knock on Any Door > Glancing Back

then on she was regularly pregnant, although not all the children were baptised. In 1827 James and Harriet had a baby Harriet who was baptised in St Nicholas’ Church in Dyke Road. Perhaps they could afford a christening for some, but not for others.They had five more children but not all recur in census records which probably means that several of Ellen’s siblings did not survive beyond infancy.

In 1852 Ellen married George Farrant, a Brighton born plasterer. They were my great great grandparents.

This young couple later lived in Sun Street, just the other side of Carlton Hill from Woburn Place. This is where their daughter Mary Ann (my future great-grandmother) was born.

James Patterson was aged 70 when he died. His cause of death was certified as bronchitis and exhaustion.

The death was registered by his widow Harriet who gave her mark in lieu of a signature.

In the 1881 census Harriet was living at 32 Park Place with her 39 year old daughter Eliza, a widow listed as a washer laundress. Her 16 year old daughter and her 33 year old widowed sister-in-law also lived in the household and are also washerwomen. It must have been crowded because Eliza’s older – and unemployed – brother also lived there as did her 14 year-old son George working as a bricklayer’s labourer, and a younger daughter who was still at school. Apart from the earnings of her young son, the entire household depended upon laundry work.

Harriet survived until 1890 when she died at the age of 82 from ‘senile decay’. Her son James Patterson registered the death on 18 March 1890 and, unlike his mother, and his older sister Ellen when she got married, he was able to supply his signature on his mother’s death certificate.

From this small piece of research it is possible to conclude that Harriet Patterson and her daughters and granddaughters were earning their living as washer women throughout most of the nineteenth century.

Their capital costs would have been few: water could be drawn from wells as rain water filtered through the chalk to join underground streams finding their way to the sea throughout the Carlton Hill area. These wells allowed the many small breweries and laundries to

draw their own water without paying for it. Later, public standpipes were installed. As in other parts of Brighton, there were drying grounds where washing could be hung out.

I visualise my ancestors crammed into the balcony of St Nicholas’ Church, so that the ‘quality’ in the pews below do not have to see or smell them. No wonder that my grandmother, Ellen’s granddaughter, grew up with a morbid fear of the workhouse on Elm Grove and a determination that the family she raised would be ‘respectable’.

> Page 21

COMMUNITY >

At the Poor End of Town

by Molly Grace;

COMMUNITY “One chap used to say ‘Well, you grew up in a slum’ – Oh I wanted to slap him.”

Beryl Tucknott

Here are descriptions of streets that fell down and streets that were pulled down, streets that were renewed and streets that were ruined, homes that were loved and houses that bred illness and added to hardship….

Knock on Any Door > Community

At the poor end of the town There are rows of little streets, Houses neatly huddled; front doors painted brown.

Little children playing shoeless in tattered little gowns Young mothers with sad faces grandmas cracked and grey Fathers out of work; but the rent man makes his way Around the little houses banging on the doors; We are hidden motionless; less we creak the floors.

The Sally Army feeds us with soup from big black pots; Seems our empty bellies could have taken all the lot.

To the bakers we would clamour if they had stale Bread for sale, biting off the crusty corner daring either one to tell.

Sub-standard housing forced families to live in appalling conditions. FRED RICHARDSON grew up in Carlton Row in the 1920s and 30s.

The house was four rooms on top of the other, basement then straight up.The house was very cold, wet through and alive with bugs. We used to have big bites all over us.The reason being where there’s lathe and plaster (walls) there’s bed bugs. You’d wake up in the morning with weals all over you where they’d sucked the blood out. To keep it clean we used to go to Circus Street where there was Gillams, wholesale paper people, to get the bills they put outside the shops – a white bill – and my mother used to plaster them on the wall and whitewash them (but) the bugs used to come through.

She didn’t know it (but) it was the worst thing she could do (because) she used to make a paste out of flour to stick the bills onto the wall. The whole line of houses were together like that. The bugs went from one end of the street to the other.

There was a lot of people living in Carlton Row. It was very noisy, you could hear people three doors below. No privacy, no nothing…All the girls would be in

Damp / George Street Brighton / 2011 / Chloe Howley Noisy Neighbour Poster / Milner Flats / 2012 / Chloe Howley

> Page 25

one bedroom with my mum and dad and all the boys would be in the other bedroom.

MOLLY GRACE’S first home was in Cavendish Street.

(My mother) said she hated it but it was so cheap rent there, that’s why she stayed. The rent man used to come round and he had a leather strap like a pouch, and the rent money used to go in there, and he’d give her a piece of paper to say she’d paid that week.

My mum said this woman used to be a terrible person, she used to hide if the rent man came, but he wouldn’t go away because he’d say ‘Come on Missus, open up this door, I can hear you breathing’ – the kids used to be lined up against the wall, motionless – ‘No, I know you’re there, I can hear your breathing’ – I thought, how could he hear them breathing through a flipping big door? After about an hour he used to do the rest of the street, then come back – ‘I haven’t moved, I’m still here, I want my bloody money!’ And then the door used to (creak) and this hand used to come out and give him his rent money. My mum said she was always doing it and it drove him mad: why didn’t she give it to him in the first place though? Silly.

PATRICK GEORGE is still able to wander around his old Richmond Hill home in his mind.

Immediately you go in the front door you’ve got the passage. On the right was a room, which was the one that would tilt into the street; and then you had the passageway and on the end was a room, what they called the slip room, that was a bedroom – it was so small you couldn’t get a very big bed in there. In front of the slip room (was) the staircase going down (to) the kitchen and the scullery. Immediately as you came to the bottom, up on the wall was your bank – we called it the bank – the gas meter, goes in the little recess…

All you had was a sink, some people had gas cookers but that was a luxury and they were really old things. In the house there was no heating, no storage of From the James Gray Collection, the photographic archive of the Regency Society

Knock on Any Door > Community

water, no nothing; your water and everything was down there in the kitchen.

Where I used to sleep was in the top room, in the garret, all we had was a bed, one double bed. There were nine of us, four bedrooms counting the slip room.

We used to swap around the house. I had to go and sleep on a little bunk bed so that Rose could have the bed, being a girl.

According to BEN JONES’ Ph.D thesis ‘Neighbourhood, family and home: the working class experience in midtwentieth century Brighton’, the streets with the worst reputation were those running north to south between St James’s Street and Carlton Hill.

“This neighbourhood was home to the poorest paid seasonal workers: fishermen, labourers, barrow-boys and costermongers…Such were the minute gradations of status within working class communities that different parts of the same street might be classified as more or less ‘respectable’ (depending upon who you asked).”

Ben Jones notes that it was generally acknowledged that the closer to the sea, the rougher the streets became, and past residents singled out William Street and John Street as the epitome of slum life.

EILEEN JONES – born in 1926 – was brought up in the Public Assistance Offices in Steine Gardens. Her father was the caretaker. She saw first-hand the extreme poverty some families endured.

At the bottom of Carlton Hill I can remember a doss house… there were down-and-out men there and from all accounts they would pay to sleep there… to ‘lean on a line’ for the night. They didn’t have a bed so they leaned on a line for resting, I should imagine a rope of some description. It was a pretty grim area to live in.

(The people who came to the Public Assistance Office for relief)…they would be told by different officers to sell every possession before ever they got anything, even a hearing, and then they were assessed and it was From the James Gray Collection, the photographic archive of the Regency Society

> Page 27

a great big room, like a courtroom, all beautiful oak, and there would be councillors there listening to the different stories of these people…I only know this because my father explained it, I never went in that room ever, only at night when we played judge and jury, me and my brother…and they would be assessed and be given a certain officer to deal with all their different cases; they never received any money whatsoever, it would be chitties, slips of paper, for food or children’s clothing or anything like that…there were loads and loads of them there at times, all through the building waiting in this massive great waiting room, terrific great size, benches all around a sloping floorway, a concrete floor, and into the middle there was a drain. When the building was shut all these people – I expect some of them urinated there – they smelt dreadful, all these poor people, ill-clad, dirty, smelly, and as I say, when the building shut my father used to go around with a massive great can of Jeyes fluid, tip it all over the room, all over the concrete….

I can remember seeing two ladies go completely off their heads and being contained – restraint is the wrong word – and being sent by an ambulance to St Francis mental institution. Part of my father and mother’s duty – I’m talking about my stepmother now – was to go either with a gent who was sent, or a lady, and they had no medical knowledge of anything… a pretty grim job to do, and people not trained as today…. We used to call it a Black Maria: it was a black ambulance…(that took them).

When I was about eight years old it really hit me, I began to understand very much and felt such sympathy for these people, as I say I can remember going home midday from school, whatever else my mother was, she kept us clean and we were always well-fed, she was a good cook… passing all these people on the stairway sitting waiting their turns… and had my dinner, and they must have smelt it and it must have been torture for them… and at times I used to feel choked because those people were so hungry.

And when they went to buy the boots, I can remember it was a shop in Trafalgar Street at the corner of Kensington Gardens, and the person that would serve them would take a leather punch and punch a hole in the Jeyes Bottle, Courtesy of Jeyes.

Knock on Any Door > Community

top of the boot, just one big hole so that they couldn’t pawn them: once a pawnbroker saw that he wouldn’t touch them…But the pawnbrokers were in big business then you know, it was a big business…

(The people applying for relief came from) William Street, John Street, Carlton Hill…all up through that area…somehow though those people were scrupulously clean, not all were filthy, a lot of the families worked hard and done the best for their children… fair and honest.

(A little boy died) Ah, I don’t know his name, but it was in William Street and my father was talking about it and I asked a question ‘Why Dad? How did he die?’

And he said, ‘From all accounts he must have taken a tin from a dustbin that had got fish of some description in, and eaten it,’ and that was on the next road from me, and even then I thought ‘Golly, if I’d have known he was that hungry he could have had my dinners for a few days.’

RENE WOOLGAR remembers William Street as a street of horses.

One side was houses and the other side was all stables. It could be a rag-and-bone man or someone that’s earning a living keeping the horses in stables. Quite a few of them had horses, before the motor cars.

JOAN MOORHOUSE has mixed feelings about her family home in William Street.

Well, it was not a very nice house really... I mean I had affection for it, but you came in at the front door and there was one room on that level then you went downstairs and the living room and kitchen were there but, because it was on a hill, it seemed as if it was ground floor, and we had an outside toilet, a back yard and a back gate that led into Sun Street. Then there was one room on each floor and there was a middle room, as we used to call it, and then the top room. There were 14 stairs between each floor so as I used to sleep in the top

one I was exhausted by the time I got up there. We had just one radio in the living room and that’s where I had to do my homework because it was too cold up in the bedroom and not much light either.

William Street

by Tony Spiers a man on a bicycle is poking out the street lamps with a long pole tarts are buttoning themselves up forever a fading voice of a barrowboy somewhere is crying “sprats, winkles, mackerel” fishermen with salty faces are snuffing out their clay pipes of rough shag girls in pinafores are quenching their skipping scaffolding ropes boys in short trousers are herding up their blood marbles from the gutter to go a muffin man with a hat of crumpets is muting his bell laundresses are unhitching their spick white bunting a child with a pillowcase of stale loaves is melting in the distance a coalman on his spent cart smutty as a black-headed gull is goading his horse home a man from the council is taking a photograph of the doomed street a death mask in black and white

> Page 29

It was only later in life that DENNIS SMITH realised that not everyone lived as well as his family in Blaker Street.

I didn’t realise how nice they were till I saw some of the other slums roundabout.

All the old houses they only had a terrible toilet down the back of the garden and we had one in and one out, we didn’t realise it, but it was barbarous in those days.

The Tarner area was subjected to periods of slum clearance – before World War II and again in the 1960s.

There was wide-scale demolition but some streets didn’t wait for the council bulldozers to arrive. Apollo Terrace was situated high on the hillside and the earliest houses dated back to the Regency era. There was a narrow brick pavement and walkway in front of the terrace and a high brick wall to protect Sussex Terrace 40 feet below. Brighton’s Regency Society believes that it may once have been the site of a chalk pit.

DENNIS SMITH remembers the night Apollo Terrace fell down.

Sussex Terrace had big long gardens with this high bank where Apollo Terrace was built on top and one night they all collapsed and they said in the back of the gardens (of) Sussex Terrace, years ago there were mines underneath and the ground gave way. They never opened Apollo Terrace again.

I know people who lived in Sussex Terrace, they never went down the bottom.They had big long gardens but they said it was dangerous and they didn’t know what was going to happen down there.

We knew since we were kiddies that there were these underground mines there and we were told as kids that they were tin mines but no one seems to know what they were.

PATRICK GEORGE’S family were desperate to move from their home in Richmond Hill. Desperation turned into panic when a neighbouring house collapsed.

Knock on Any Door > Community

Three doors down from us – it happened very early one morning – the front part of the wall on the first floor collapsed. It was all cobblestones the houses were and that come out and fell down and the two girls were in the back bedroom there. I think that was the reason why my mother finally got something done because the council really got concerned when that happened.

Everyone was coming out saying ‘If that happened to their house it could happen to our house’; you know, so it caused a bit of a panic. They moved so fast after that. I think some went to Whitehawk, I think there were two or three houses that went to Whitehawk. And that was the end of our street then.

RENE WOOLGAR’S grandmother also moved from Richmond Hill to St John’s Place.

Every Sunday morning we’d have to put our best clothes on – because you only wore them on a Sunday – and walk up to 18 Richmond Hill and seeGranny Page who lived in an old house and she’d be sat in an armchair and you could watch the people’s feet walking across the grating: she was underground if you know what I mean, but the back was level.

Well, they were due for coming down….(and) they moved them up the hill to St John’s Place and Granny Page, being on a hill, she could look right over Brighton, at St Peter’s Church, the railway station, she could see the top, and she thought she was in heaven.

But what she liked the most was to see a light switch on a wall and a light come on in the middle of a room because she’d never ever seen that before.

MOLLY GRACE’S family were also re-housed in St John’s Place but only after officials were presented with a compelling argument.

My sister Irene was bitten by a rat and it was in the Brighton & Hove Herald: ‘RATS TERRORISING CHILDREN’. Well my mother went to the official what’sit of health in – well it’s a hotel now – it used to be

Albion Hill Redevelopment. Photographs taken in 1960 as this vast area was being cleared so that several blocks of high rise flats could replace the many worn out mean streets in this area. From the James Gray Collection, the photographic archive of the Regency Society.

Houses leaning like friends, me exterior winter looking in on warmth Haiku by Yassin Zelestine Photo by Lorna Glynn

the health inspector there, in the Old Steine. He was a pompous old bugger. He said, ‘Mrs Hayman,’ – because that was my mother’s name – ‘Mrs Hayman, I doubt whether you’ve even seen a rat, it’s probably mice.’

My father had a bayonet from the First World War and he brought it home as a souvenir and my mother sat up at night as the rats come down the chimney, chopping them in half. She found a big fat rat, wrapped it up in newspaper, went down to the health people and shoved it straight in his face and said, ‘That’s what rats look like!’

He screamed the place down and everybody came in and threw my mother out. But then, my mother got a brand new house in Carlton Hill, called St John’s Place, and she couldn’t even wait for the door to be screwed on, we rushed in there quick.…I was about six when she moved to St John’s Place.

Oh, it was wonderful, and it was a sunny day and the man was still putting the front door on: ‘Come in’, and we all rushed past the poor chap and he dropped his tools on the floor, he said ‘I’ve never seen anything like it…’ like rushed lightning…

Almost 80 years later PATRICK GEORGE can still taste the excitement he felt when he learnt that his family had been allocated a new home in St John’s Place.

Mr Holt (a council housing official) came up to see my mother and they were in there a long time. I was hanging about. If ever anybody come to visit you always had to leave the house because there was nowhere private, so that was it, out on the street. I was playing with Jimmy Birch, and they called me up, ‘Mum wants to see you.’ I’d seen Mr Holt walking on the street and Mum is standing downstairs and she’s talking to my sister Ruth, and they’re all excited and I stood there listening to them and they’re all chattering…and then my sister Rose come in, ‘What’s going on?’ and that’s when it really struck me.

I heard Mother, ‘We’ve got a house! We’ve got a new house!’

And my sister graced these words, I’ll always remember this: ‘Mum, you’ve got to get up there straight away and get it because someone else will get in there.’

Ruth went and got Joey off the hook – our canary – and she said, ‘Give that to Paddy, tell him to go up there now, put him in: once you’ve got something in the house they can’t touch it.’

It always sounds really silly but I marched up the hill to St John’s Place, but when I got up there the chaps were still working – they worked Saturday – your working days didn’t finish Friday like you do now. When I went in with the cage I can remember the chap saying to me, ‘Hello my cocker, what you doing here?’

And I said – one of the things I’ll never forget – I said, ‘This is my new house, my mum said so.’

‘Oh is it? Who told you?’

‘My mum told me, she told me to bring the bird up.’

So he said ‘Well, you can’t come in yet because we haven’t finished yet, we won’t have finished until the end of that day, we’ve still got work to do. We might have a bit to do next week.’

And I said, ‘Mum said I mustn’t go out, I must leave the bird.’

‘I tell you what,’ he said, ‘Leave the bird here, we can look after it and you can come up again and feed the bird.’

Anyway, on the Monday morning, the council said, ‘They’re out of the house now, the house is finished, we’ve passed it, you can now go in.’ And that was it.

FRED RICHARDSON’S family moved from Carlton Row to Tilbury Road in the early 30s when he was about 13.

We got the whole lot on the barrow, pulled it up Albion Hill. The road wasn’t made up then, it was all rough ground.

> Page 33

Moulsecoomb and Whitehawk 2012 / Joe Murphy

Knock on Any Door > Community

> Page 35

Moving On – fiction based on fact

by Mar y Andrews Elizabeth looked around the room. There were no photographs – they never could afford a camera. Yet the room was full of memories – a whole lifetime spent in this place. She was born here and, she had thought, she would die here too. But today she was going to move to a council flat, and she was 80 years old!

She looked at the old fireplace. She remembered back to the children she bathed there, their glowing faces and soft skin. It made her smile. She remembered her courtship with Harry and her delight when he had come to the door with a bunch of beautiful anemones.

Further back she remembered her mother and father dying. The old back room, now empty, had housed their coffins. Shuddering she remembered the hushed voices and the feeling of despair at the weight of responsibility on her young shoulders. She was only 18 when she was left to bring up a family of four. Johnny and Reg, the next in line, went out to work when there was work, on the local farms and building sites. She and her sister had taken in the washing from the wealthier families in Kemp Town and somehow they had eked out a living.

It was when she was 19 years old that she had fallen in love. Harold had come from a local fishing family.

Every morning he went out at daybreak on the boat with his father and brother. It was evening by the time the fish were caught and sold. He was blond and burly and his skin was tanned and his cheeks ruddy from the sun and the sea winds. And Elizabeth loved him. He came to see her every Sunday after church with a posy of flowers.

That winter he’d sit by the fire as the kettle boiled for tea.

By spring time he had asked her to marry him. At first she refused. She could not leave her brothers and sisters.

The youngest was only 11 years old. Finally she agreed as long as she could stay put with them. And so Harold moved in. Times were a little better then, and once they even had a leg of lamb on Sunday.

Then the babies started to arrive. First David, then Harry, then Molly and Elsie, then Helen. Every baby was a stretch on their finances. When Helen arrived there was so little money that David had had to run

across the street to borrow money from the neighbours for the electricity meter so that the midwife could carry out the birth.There were only two bedrooms so the girls shared one room and the boys another. At first Elizabeth shared a bed in the living room with Harold but after Helen arrived she went to sleep in the girls’ room, afraid that otherwise more children might be born.

She was always surrounded by her family but one by one they all married and found new homes. And so Elizabeth spent some quiet years with Harold at the end of his life. Too old to work, the children helped them get by. Elizabeth could not have been happier watching new nieces and nephews appear and, later, grandchildren. She remembered each of their birthdays and made sure no matter how poor they were that she gave them a card on the appropriate day. Quite a feat for an old lady since at the last count there were 15 grandchildren.

When Harold passed away it seemed the bottom of Elizabeth’s life had dropped out. Her children tried in vain to comfort her. Harold had been by her to the end. Finally, her cheerful character won though and everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

Then came the news that the road was to be knocked down. New council houses and flats were being built further up the hill and Elizabeth was to be re-housed.

She walked round her home, visiting every room remembering where the children were born, where games had been played and accidents had happened.

And, finally, the bed where she and Harold had slept. It was to be done away with now. It was so old it sagged as she sat down on it.Yet it had borne her and her husband through all those years of their marriage. She went into the yard to speak to Flo next door. Those days the bond between the two neighbours had grown even deeper, knowing that they were soon to be parted. ‘Promise to visit,’ she whispered urgently as the doorbell rang...

It was David, her eldest son, with the car. She took one final look around. Ah, the outside toilet. At least in her new flat she wouldn’t have to freeze every time nature called.

All her life was there in that house. Elizabeth climbed into the car brushing the tears from her eyes.

And now a new adventure – at her age too. ‘I never had time for an adventure before. I suppose it’s not too late for one to start...’

BERYL TUCKNOTT feels that slum clearance often meant the destruction of houses that would have made lovely homes.

The other side of Albion Hill they didn’t touch, those houses are still there, still thriving, lovely little houses, exactly the same as on the other side of the road, which they stripped down. A disgrace. They’ve all been modernised and they’re lovely little houses, especially ideal for first time buyers.

Claremont Row, they were all like lovely little cottages, you can imagine them with little roses round the door – terraced with little gardens in the front.

RON BURTENSHAW has fewer regrets.

The slum area at the bottom of Richmond Street and Albion Hill was cleared very quickly and the redevelopment followed almost immediately. Blocks of 12 storey flats, new shops and well laid out lawns really improved the area. A new footpath was laid to link in with the remains of Richmond Street, doing away with the railings that had been erected to prevent runaway horses and carts from careering down the hill.

SHIRLEY AND JOHN TIDEY still have reservations about the changes that took place even though they are convinced that the house they rented had to be pulled down as part of the post-war slum clearance programme.

I was glad because it wasn’t a very big place and it was damp, so old. Private landlord that was – I don’t think there was much the landlord could do about the damp. There was a single skin wall and the damp just walked through there and it got damper... Lennox

Street was really old – must have been over 150 years old, might have been older than that, yeah. (But) it’s not the same when they pull the houses down, it’s not the same…

The four storey Milner Flats were erected in 1934 on the site of Woburn Place and were the first flats built by Brighton Corporation. They were named after Alderman Hugh Milner Black. Four years later Kingswood Maisonettes – named after Sir Kingsley Wood, Minister of Health – were built on the site of Nelson Place and a Methodist Chapel in Sussex Street.

PAUL DOYLE had strong feelings about Milner Flats. …designer slums basically… They was state of the art when they was built. (Graham Greene painted) a very vivid portrait of Brighton at the time. (It was) the atmosphere he captured, the seedy side of Brighton.

This is how Graham Greene described Nelson Place in Brighton Rock published in 1938: “…the houses which looked as if they had passed through an intensive bombardment, flapping gutters and glassless windows, an iron bedstead rusting in a front garden, the smashed and wasted ground in front where houses had been pulled down for model flats which had never gone up…”

JOSIE KNOWELDEN was born in Milner Flats in 1937 and has never lived anywhere else and never wanted to: her father helped build them and she has always been surrounded by family and friends.

My dad was a lifeguard…and then during the winter, (the council)… used to give a job on the building…and he helped build these. He was only like a labourer. (My mother and father) were living down William Street, (he) came from Nelson Place…they were all condemned then, so most of them came into Lino / St James Street Flats 2011 / Chloe Howley

> Page 37

these; those that didn’t want to (were given) houses up at Whitehawk.

Never locked your doors, never; I think my nan only had one key…But then we didn’t have anything to pinch, no one had any more than anyone else then but no one could leave (anything) outside, it was gone, absolutely, if it was out there more than ten minutes. But they wouldn’t go in your house and take anything… If it was left outside, then they’d have it.

Lovely it used to be round here then: you could sit outside late in the night talking. You weren’t afraid to walk the streets then anyhow. In fact the police were more frightened of us then I think because they used to come here in twos, they did. Always come in twos, never come on their own. But I used to wonder why because nobody was ever that bad anyway, but of course there were a lot of barrow boys along here then, so I suppose they felt a bit threatened by them.

When they look back today I suppose they think it was hard, but it wasn’t hard really, because no one had anything, so you wasn’t envious of nobody.You came out of one job and you got into another job straight away because they weren’t hard to get then.

I had two uncles lived round the other flats, Kingswood, and I had two aunties living along here, so it was always a very, very close community; everybody knew everybody: mums knew the nans, and the daughters and the kids, we were all brought up together.

I loved it here.

She still does.

We sit out in the summer and you get to know all of the mums over the school. Three of my granddaughters are working now in that school, in the nursery.

While some tenants were re-housed locally, most were offered homes on the new housing estates developed in the 1930s on the eastern edge of Brighton in Moulsecoomb and Whitehawk. PATRICK GEORGE’S mother didn’t want to go, fearing the social isolation.

Knock on Any Door > Community

My mother hung on and hung on. Mr Holt from the council (wanted to knock the street down) and she just wouldn’t go. I think she could see herself all alone because there wasn’t a moment in her day there wasn’t someone coming or going, and I think she had visions of being in a place on her own.

MOLLY GRACE’S mother had sound economic reasons for refusing to move so far out of town.

My mother had to push the barrow (and) they asked her to have a house up Whitehawk but she said, ‘no, my business has got to be near where I live’, because of the barrow. Whitehawk had no bus service at all for years up there, it was really a long way away, and my mother couldn’t do it, not with a barrow.

JOHN STEVENS was told as a child that the Tarner Estate was built “for the boys coming home” from World War I. I remember my mum talking about it because they were built at the same time as Whitehawk… from the bottom of Carlton Hill, Sun Street and William Street, all those houses down there, basically they was hoping they were going to go up on the Tarner Estate, because that was farm land before they built the estate on there, and they wanted to go there and not be sent out to Whitehawk…

JOSIE KNOWELDEN recalls that some who moved to Whitehawk came back to the Tarner area.

Quite a few people moved in the end, into houses…and a lot of them came back as well. I think because everyone was so happy here…they came back searching for the same thing, and it was never the same thing. There were a hell of a lot of people that moved back who’d moved out.

Richmond Heights / Chloe Howley

> Page 39

An article in the BRIGHTON GAZETTE in November 1937 reported that re-housing had caused poverty and malnutrition for some families as rents were higher on the new estates and some could not afford to travel back into central Brighton to work. As a result charity canteens were set up in some areas to provide cheap meals.

However, many families were delighted with the prospect of a new home and a new start. MARION DEVOY’S family was one of them, even if her father needed a lot of convincing that Manor Road on the Whitehawk Estate was going to be better than Albion Street.

My mum was very happy to move. As soon as she knew they were moving, she saved up to buy her furniture, curtains and lino. The new house had a bathroom and two gardens which, to my mum, was paradise! My dad didn’t want to move. He didn’t want to leave the area and live in the country! He wouldn’t go to see the new house until the last day when the council were boarding up the houses in Albion Street.

When he finally got there he actually liked it. It was just so upmarket to anything he’d ever known. Also many of their neighbours moved with them and so were still their neighbours. I think that was council policy in those days.

people, and I used to go on outings and trips, the friendliest of people in the main. It doesn’t matter where you live, you’re going to get the good and the bad. But if anybody’s in trouble, they’re there, if they know about it, you know.

Born in the last decade of the Victorian era, HARRY COWLEY was a chimney sweep who campaigned for better housing and practical assistance for the unemployed and disadvantaged. In the 1930s he became a key figure in the fight against fascism in Brighton when he and his family were living in Tarner, at 3 Grove Street, halfway up Albion Hill. Determined to improve the lives of his working class neighbours, Harry’s political views were shaped by the needs of the community to which he belonged. When he died in 1971, hundreds crowded into St Peter’s Church in central Brighton to pay their respects.

PAUL DOYLE’S family were just one of the families that benefited from the campaigns of Harry Cowley.

Paul grew up in Moulsecoomb from the age of nine having moved from the North Laine – another part of Brighton that had been condemned as slums. Here he remembers life on the new estate.

BERYL TUCKNOTT grew up in Tarner in the 1930s and has happy memories of her 27 years in Whitehawk.

We lived in such grotty places before that, it was like landing on your feet… I think when you’re young any place is a nice place to grow up because you make your own adventures, you make it a nice place… If we ever wanted to get away we’d walk to Lewes and back. You see the friends I made up Moulsecoomb they tended to stick all my life.

It’s a mixture, isn’t it? Fond memories and not so fond memories. Poverty’s never pleasant anyway, it was definitely a life of poverty… (as a kid) you just know don’t you? I never looked at it in a material sense, I mean you can be poor, you can be poverty-stricken even, but you can be rich in your thinking, can’t you...

There is a wonderful community spirit in Whitehawk. You only hear about the bad things that happen in Whitehawk, but there is some wonderful

MALCOLM KEEPING has 70 years of memories of the area.

After the war, FRED RICHARDSON and his wife were offered a pre-fab in Whitehawk.

That was out of this world. Today they’ve built lovely houses along there – all Wilson Avenue was prefabs, top to bottom. Hundreds and hundreds of them on that road: German prisoners of war put them up.

Knock on Any Door > Community

This house is a six room house, the ones at the top of the road are only four roomed houses. Or they were – not now obviously – they had extensions put round the back. So downstairs all you had was a kitchen and the front room, a little narrow staircase, and two rooms upstairs. The loo was out in the garden, no bathroom or anything like that but then none of the houses up here had bathrooms. The kitchen had a pantry and the bath-tub used to hang in there, a big galvanised iron; the kitchen also had an old copper in it which was fired up with coal to boil water for the washing but that was all knocked out and it made the kitchen that much bigger.

Sussex Street was very steep, they used to have the sledges out and go down the hill on the sledge and… at the Blue House, there were railings across there, and (a neighbour) went down there and he went straight over the steps and down to the bottom…

Tarner is built on hills. Albion Hill – where MALCOLM lives – is the highest in central Brighton. It reaches 230 feet above sea level at its peak – near Windmill Terrace.

In the 1940s when RON BURTENSHAW was growing up, Windmill Street was regarded as rather special.

JEAN COLLINS can imagine what student neighbours must be thinking.

They see you go up and they think ‘there goes the poor old dear up the hill again’… We always say, ‘once I can’t get up that hill, I can’t go out.’ We’ve always lived on the hills you see; sometimes the people who go to St Luke’s Church, they say ‘how do you manage walking up this hill?’ With great difficulty at times…

However, the landscape of the streets has changed, as RON JEWELL recalls.

Those hills we’ve got now didn’t run straight down in our day, they went down like that to the corner of our road, and there was a drop about 15 feet and you had to go down some railings to get to the other part, both ends.

Steep streets could be exciting when you were a child, SHIRLEY TIDEY remembers, but there were also dangers.

There was a similar railing across Richmond Street.

When we were kids we used to run down and slide down through it. My brother once saw a nurse go down there on a bike and the brakes failed and she went straight over the top…

Windmill Street was a very pretty street which stood out on its own, despite the appearance of some of the slum dwellings in the neighbouring areas. It was a street of pretty bay windows, neatly painted walls. It was always clean and tidy with very few cars about.

I do not think that the camaraderie among the residents of the street was unique. However, during the war there were very few men about, so the ladies living in the street had to fend for themselves and their children, and other children in the street. In fact, I had so many aunties I never really knew if I was related to them or not; I did when I grew up.

Everybody looked after each other, no doors were locked; burglary was not in the dictionary in those days. Often the front door would be opened followed by the words, ‘Cooee, are you in?’ If the door was bolted and you were in, it did not take long for the street to know you were up to something.

MARION DEVOY was thrust into community activities when she moved into Windmill Street in the early 1970s – efforts which established the most prolific community book publisher in the country.

> Page 41

Albion Hill Area. Top photograph from 27 August 1960 shows two of the new blocks of flats under construction. From the James Gray Collection, the photographic archive of the Regency Society.

Dinapore Street and the Live and Let Live Public House. This street was demolished in December 1965.

From the James Gray Collection, the photographic archive of the Regency Society.

I’d only been there a day when someone knocked on my door with a clipboard and said, ‘You don’t want the spa in the Queen’s Park to be turned into a restaurant do you?

So I said, ‘No’.

‘You’d like it to be a Nursery School, wouldn’t you?’

So I said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Sign here please.’

I didn’t really know what they were talking about but from that day on I became part of a campaigning group to turn the derelict spa in Queen’s Park into a nursery school. It took five years. Meanwhile we started a community newspaper once a month called Sparkives.

We kept people up to date with the campaign plus other news. We used to take it in turns to produce it in each other’s houses.

We also used to have meetings in the Queen’s Park Tavern on Queen’s Park Road. I was there one evening when Albert Paul from Southampton Street came to the meeting. He brought with him some exercise books in which he’d been writing his life story every Tuesday afternoon when his wife went to the bingo. He gave them to us and we all took it in turns to read them, the result of which was the inception of QueenSpark Books. The first one was Poverty, Hardship but Happiness by Albert Paul.

PAMELA SIMPSON moved to Sussex Terrace in the early 70s. A single mother in her 40s, Pamela’s time in Tarner was fully occupied with work and family.

I didn’t socialise much with the community because I was working almost full time and I was looking after my children, and my grandchild and my mother who later became demented so I didn’t have much time (for) social things.

When Pamela spoke to her children and granddaughter about Tarner she realised as children growing up in the area their experiences were quite different from her own.

I got their views on it (and) I found that in actual fact it was quite a nice little community.The children sort of looked at my bleak picture and couldn’t recognise it at all; especially my granddaughter.

Pamela’s granddaughter attended Carlton Hill School in the early 90s. Although she has fond memories of her time there, even as a child she was aware of the social divide that played out in the behaviours and uniforms of the children but this didn’t impact on their ability to mix and get on as neighbours.

I remember my school days well, although a lot of children seemed unprivileged, and I did enjoy most of my young life at this school; many children were badly behaved at the school due to poor family life and as a child I remember noticing a difference between [those] well brought-up children and those who were not.

When teaming up with other schools for events such as music concerts and sports, our school always stood out as scruffy.

What was wonderful about attending Carlton Hill (School)... were the friendships that I made: after school myself and friends would spend many afternoons at Queen’s Park, Tarner Park and playing on our bikes along Sussex Terrace, and John Street where my nan lived.

Kids swarmed the streets playing games such as ’44 Save All’, ‘Hide-and-Seek’ – this was especially common along Richmond Street.

The community was very close and everybody knew one another. When I travel past Sussex Terrace today I never see kids playing out, which seems a shame, as some of my fondest memories are of playing with friends there. Nanny, a man known by many in the area, DJ-d for my tenth birthday at the Hanover Centre, where many children had their birthdays; the After School Club also used their place. On a Monday evening I used to attend Brownies at Dorset Gardens Church, children from my school and surrounding schools would attend too.

When I look back I can remember such a mix of classes living in and around the Carlton Hill areas: I

> Page 43

think this was because of the mix of different housing.

My nan lived along Sussex Terrace in a house which was attached to many others – but across the road council houses were located; many houses privately owned were situated next to council housing and I believe still are.The great and wonderful thing about the community was that everyone seemed to get on regardless of class.

I find the Tarner area to be very closed off from the rest of Brighton area, like another world, which I really loved about it. I often drive through now and feel quite warm and my head fills with happy memories.

I feel privileged to have lived in such a great community.

FRED RICHARDSON remembers when street lamps were lit by gas and had to be turned on and turned off.

There used to be the lampman, Mr Chalmers.

He was injured during the war (World War I). He had a pedal on his bike which was higher than the other, so he had one leg shorter than the other. He’d pedal round and he used to have a big long rod with a hook on the end and he’d come round of a night and turn it on, and early in the morning you could hear him come along and pull the other one (to turn it off). That’s how that was done.

Gas was a very precious commodity in the Richardson household.

You had a gas mantle to offer lighting and that would only be in the living room, wouldn’t be nowhere else. We had a candle upstairs. A flimsy mantle which cost fourpence a time but you never had fourpence, so you just had the flare, which was very dark.

The gas would go and I used to stand on the piano stool to reach (the meter). I was always fairly tall.

A bar went across, and we used to put the penny in and go click, click, click. Five clicks and then the penny would come out again. When the gasman used to come round he’d say, ‘there’s only thruppence in here.’

Knock on Any Door > Community

Five clicks – ‘Oh we’re set up now aren’t we? We’re away with the mixer. Mum, put the oven on, put the lot on.’

DENNIS SMITH remembers when electric light arrived.

We only had gas, you had to put a mantle on, but the gas mantles kept falling to pieces so we had to keep getting new mantles.They hooked on the top.They were just a fine filament and they used to burn out and you had to get another one. They hung on the ceiling.

I don’t know whether we had lights in any of the bedrooms. I know we had one in the front room and in the kitchen but I can’t remember if we had one in the bedroom. No, we mostly had candles.

But I can remember when we changed over to electric. I could only have been about 12 or 13 I suppose and we loved putting on the switches. It was marvellous.

My uncle and aunt who lived a couple of doors up had it put in a year before us, they kept on, ‘You’ll have to have it in.’ Eventually we got it in and we couldn’t believe it.

We had it put in all the rooms.

MALCOLM KEEPING looks back to the time when the electricity supply to Tarner was basic.

These houses were originally built with only gas lighting and they were converted to electricity – very primitive – majority was only just lighting. We had one small socket in the dining room which was installed with the original wiring, all it took was the television that’s all.

Any other plugs and sockets in the house – I only think we had about one or two – were installed by my father.

He was capable of doing that, wiring it up and wiring it up onto a separate fuse box, up to the meter.

It was DC, direct current. After the war the trend was to convert everything to AC, alternating current, which made it easier for electrical appliances to be operated. Of course the whole lot of the wiring had to be redone, not in the houses but in the streets so all the pavements and roads were dug up and the old cables

The home of the interviewees / 2012 / Chloe Howley

> Page 45

Electrical box cordoned Wall weeds break Summer in parched leaf Haiku by Alanna McIntyre Photo by Lorna Glynn

were torn out and this new modern heavy-duty cable for AC mains was installed. The pavements were dug up, a right mess it was for quite some time; all rewired then a changeover to AC electricity, which was a great boon because then you could plug anything into it. It’s strange you don’t think anything of that nowadays. Before that it was all DC. You had to make sure the radio you’d got would work on DC; if it was an AC-only radio it would have been a radio with a big transformer in it to supply all the voltages. A DC one would have what they called a mains dropper – it looks like a bar of a radiator to be quite honest. Now if you brought an AC radio here and plugged it in, the first thing you’d notice would be a cloud of smoke coming out the back because you’d just burned it up. It was something you had to be very careful with. So that was a great step forward….

The main cables to this day are still the original.

It’s pretty hefty, thick, heavy cable so you know it will last there’s no problem there. It was mainly the wiring in the actual rooms which was replaced so it was very thin wire, that ran in a metal tube conduit which they don’t do here anymore. The cables are just literally encased in plastic nowadays and they just run the wires underneath the floors, no conduit or anything like that.

BEN JONES’ research reveals that the streets of Tarner were home to settled Romany families, seasonal migrants from France and Italian immigrants who had arrived at the end of the 19th century. MOLLY GRACE’S experiences support the idea that Tarner has always been a diverse community.

One of my aunts was Italian – they came over long before the war started. Teresa de Mario married my mother’s brother (and) they had a baby. Because she wanted to work the old Italian people came over, the grandfather and the grandmother and they never learnt English, they came long before the war, because she married an Englishman and she spoke good English, but a lot of people hated the Italians, because we were at war with Italy.

PATRICK GEORGE also remembers multi-cultural Tarner.

In Richmond Hill, the top right-hand side which is the side of the stables, the very top was taken over by an Italian family, and I used to go up there quite a lot, they were really nice people – their name was Santos, and she was marvellous, the old Italian woman. When I was a kid, if you had a fall or anything like that, she’d always have some special treatment to do for it. And it always worked, all strange things that she used to do. And Tony, that was the son. They used to do asphalting in Brighton.

She was a very strict mother, she talked like a sergeant major, but they were marvellous people, they were lovely people they were.There were quite a lot of Italians around the area itself. Where they lived, all the stables had big doors but they altered theirs themselves and made a neat little door. Tony, the son, he had a hair lip.

We used to get people come down the doors, every now and again in the summer, and they could be Indian, French, gypsies, we had lots and lots of gypsies.

Come race day, you used to have loads and loads of gypsies come down the houses selling wicker stuff and brooms and brushes. There was always quite a good show of different nationalities there…

The Irish always got the worst reputation.

SALLY LATTER’S memories of Tarner date back to the 60s.

I lived at the bottom of St John’s Place in a two bedroomed house with my parents and older sister.

Catherine was nine years older than me. We used to have allotments next door to our house on the left.

Eventually the Sussex Deaf Association people took over the church hall and later on they extended it over the allotments in 1980. The church hall was, of course, used for social occasions.The church didn’t close down until 1980.

We were the first of four houses going up the hill.

The Hill family lived in the fourth house. On the other side of them was Tarnerland Nursery School. I went to Tarnerland Nursery School for three weeks. I remember

> Page 47

it. This girl made me sit in a toy car and she ran around like a maniac pushing it. I was petrified. I suppose it was about ten minutes but it seemed like eternity to me.

The house at the other end was two bedroomed and the two houses in the middle were three bedroomed.

Where Brighton Unemployed Centre is now used to be a girls’ youth club.

On the right is Carlton Hill First School. I went there for two terms and then we emigrated to Australia.

That is still there – about 30 years ago they built onto the infants school so it became a primary school. They closed down St John’s Church of England school which was just opposite.

Some people – like RON JEWELL – had the opportunity to buy their own home in Tarner after World War II. Cost me £1,800 when I bought this (house in Queen’s Park Road). I got married in 1952. My motherin-law lived here but it was under trust and so was the next door one. And the trustees all died except one, and she came and saw us and she said, ‘Want to buy the house?’ Of course we put our own bath and all that in you know, electricity we put that all in ourselves. The next one cost £2,200 because they hadn’t done much to it.

Rates used to be about £200 a year, and that was water rates and everything else, and if you wanted to have a hosepipe you paid 7/6d a year for all that – that’s all you paid for water. Look at it now, I’m on my own now and I’m still paying £111 a month and £47 per month for water.

MALCOLM KEEPING has lived all his life in the same house on Albion Hill.

My dad knew I was about to appear, and he wanted something settled, so he decided to take the place. He rented it; he never bought this property until the 1960s when I was out at work earning some money.

In those days there wasn’t the money about to do those

Knock on Any Door > Community

types of things. It’s only my generation who came around in the 1960s who were able to earn the money to pay for these things. So that’s what happened.

CLIFF AND DOROTHY RAYMON lived in Woodingdean but they wanted a house of their own nearer the town.

Well, the houses were cheap then. Of course, I didn’t have the money to pay for the house, (Mother) had the money, she bought the house and I paid her back.

They were nice neighbours, there were no cars and no big buildings, so we had quite a nice view over the town…We knew practically everybody in the street here, all the neighbours, but now we only know about three.

CHLOE HOWLEY visited her grandparents in the late 1970s and 1980s.

My grandparents Ted and Cathy Howley lived in Richmond Heights. I can remember visiting them, and how different their home was to my mum’s. I lived with my mum and stepdad in a Regency town house converted into flats in Hove. With high ceilings and period features, it was a bit rundown but a really beautiful flat. Richmond Heights felt so big – like the biggest tower of flats I had ever seen and I loved to go there.

Inside it was all metal and lino. I remember the steel lift with mirrors and how sometimes it smelt of smoke. You could also smell all the different meals being cooked in the flats. On my grandparents’ floor which was near the top you could tell what the neighbours’ meals might be as the aroma of food was strong around meal times: chips, cabbage, roast dinners.

It was a compact flat with lino tiles on all the floors and some carpets. I remember this as it felt cold when I had bare feet and so different from my mum’s who had floor boards and hessian carpets. I remember a hallway with a small telephone table and to the right

was a small bathroom and toilet with no windows. You went into the front room which was small and off that was a tiny kitchen. It was so small you could stand and cook and just spin around from the fridge to the cooker to the sink. My grandma would fetch a stool and I would stand on it as a little girl and the view was amazing you could see all over Brighton. It felt like the highest place in the world to me when I was six.You could see St Peter’s Church and all the little houses.

There was a larder in the kitchen, I could stand in it to reach for biscuits or cakes. They tended to have different kinds of treats for me. Things my mum may not have bought. My mum liked to shop in Infinity Foods in the North Laine and Waitrose, but my grandparents shopped mainly in the London Road and the Co-Op. They had a balcony but I was never allowed on it. Living near the top and me being so little I can understand why. Sometimes I would stay the night. They had twin beds and also both had alarm clocks by their beds which were always ticking away. At night I was tucked in so tightly I could not move my feet. They used sheets and blankets. My grandma had a lovely dressing table which fascinated me. She had everything laid out so neatly: a hair brush, mirror and a comb with pretty flowers embroidered onto the back; a big pot of cream and a box with rings and hair clips. I liked it so much I now have one myself!

Richmond Heights felt like an exciting place to visit, my grandparents knew their neighbours and I think they were all a support to one another, keeping an eye out for each other.

In the early 1970s MARION DEVOY discovered that buying a home was her family’s only option.

I got married in 1969, had my son in 1970 and finished up living with my mum and dad as renting with a baby was so difficult. As we weren’t overcrowded, we would never have been re-housed by the council, so we looked for a house to buy. We moved into Windmill Street in 1972. The house cost £2,000 and the council gave us a grant of £1,000 to make it habitable. My Bike and Basket / Grand Parade Brighton 2012 / Chloe Howley Childs Bike / Kingswood Maisonettes Brighton 2012 / Chloe Howley

> Page 49

Knock on Any Door > Community

Doors Tarner 2012 / Chloe Howley / Jess Huffman

> Page 51

Edward Street 2012 / Chloe Howley

Knock on Any Door > Community

Doors Tarner 2011 / Chloe Howley / Jess Huffman

> Page 53

Richmond Parade 2011 / Ashton Rise 2011 / Chloe Howley

Knock on Any Door > Community

husband was earning £24 per week at the time! I had my daughter in 1975 and as we only had two bedrooms we looked for something larger. We stayed there until 1977 and then moved to Albion Hill. It was a much larger house (four bedrooms) but was derelict. It cost £6,000.

It had a closure order on it made by the council as it was too bad to live in. But we moved in anyway and camped for a year or so while my husband did it up around us.

In 2011 a house in Windmill Street sold for £272,000 and Albion Hill for £245,000.

SEAN DE PODESTA came to Tarner in the 1980s for similar reasons.

When we moved here, it was the only house we looked at because we were limited – the next door was boarded-up. It was the only house we could ever afford, but to have a garden… You know with expecting a child and being able to have a garden and things and the views are fantastic – probably one of the few houses where you can see Brighton Pier and Worthing Pier from the windows.

JUDY SIMON also moved to Albion Hill in the 1980s.

The flats where I live were purpose-built between 1850 and 1890 and they were built for people who worked in the area. There was a farm directly behind me – well it’s not a fully fledged farm now but it was then; some of the people were farm labourers, and some worked in other areas of the town or worked on the seafront. The flats were built so that they were one on top of the other going up one of the steepest hills in Brighton.

I still live in the same flat now and you walk in through the front door and go straight up the stairs. The people that were living underneath me – and still are – reared four children living in these flats, and two of those children were still living there with the mother when I moved in; the oldest one was 31 and the youngest one

was 21 then. That was 30 years ago, and those two are still there now – they were born there both of them.

And then gradually over the last 30 years a lot of those flats have been sold off to first-time buyers and young people moving in and living there for a fairly short period of time, then moving out again…

The nine storey high Amex House was opened in September 1977 as the European Headquarters for American Express. By 2010 it had a workforce of about 3,000. As this book was going to print a new building was emerging from an 18-month building development that looks onto the neighbouring Carlton Hill Primary School. The sloping site means that the building will have nine stories on one side but only five on the other.

Chates dairy farm stood on the northern side of Richmond Street from 1858 to 1934.The block of flats known as Chates Farm Court opened in February 1980 and was built on the site. JUDY SIMON discovered the area when her son was growing up and she was tending her allotment.

The big field which was the orchard from the farm was right at the back of our flats and you’d just go over the wall at the back and you were in the allotments.

So there was this amazing piece of unknown wild area which loads of people don’t really know anything about.

My first induction into Chates Farm when I’d been living here a couple of years was that I should always be careful not to leave things on my washing-line overnight because the boys would come over into the back of Chates Farm and they would take the underwear.

Everything was really rickety then actually: all of the things like fences round the back. They’d just built those flats called Chates Farm Court – that had just happened when I got there. From everybody else’s point of view who’d been living there all their lives, Chates Farm was an open place where people could get in. My downstairs neighbours – when she had first come to live there – (remembers) they still had cows grazing in the orchard.

> Page 55

The allotment’s been brilliant: bringing up a child, a group of children together, using the allotments for growing stuff and for them to play, they had a den over there.

The garden of St John’s Lodge where Miss Letitia Tilbury Tarner used to live is now a vibrant community park.Tarner Park has special memories for SUE SOLLY. It was a treat going down to Brighton and we were allowed to go along and up to Tarner Park because they had that old vehicle in there – have you ever heard stories about this? Various people remember it being different things but I will always remember it as an old bakery delivery van, and we used to sit in there and we used to drive and change the gear. Because my dad never had a car, I’d never sat in one and this was absolutely lovely. Playing with kids in the park, you’re sort of aware that maybe their mums and dads weren’t very rich because they wore coats with the sleeves miles too short, you know things like that.

Did it bother me? No, class just didn’t – we were all kids having fun.

Tarner Park is an oasis of green that JUDY SIMON has striven to protect.

(The children had) just started school and we suddenly realised what a brilliant park it was... I remember thinking then how beautiful it was, how green it was and how extraordinarily wild it felt. In a funny kind of way, there it was shut in the middle of all those houses, the Tarner Estate over here and then the big Greek Orthodox Church on the other side of it, Carlton Hill School, and the open air nursery school as it was known then at the top – and this little place shut down in there...

I suppose when I started working (at the crèche at Brighton Unemployed Centre), that’s when the trouble first started happening out there, because it became a place people realised they wouldn’t be overlooked much and so it was used a lot by addicts.

Knock on Any Door > Community

At first it was glue-sniffing, that was the first thing.

It was really horrible because there’d be loads of glue bags everywhere and occasionally people lying on the ground. I would arrive (at the centre) first thing in the morning for work and go outside so I was forever having to sort people out, people reeling around and that sort of thing.

They built a lit wooden house on the grass, it was lovely for the children to play in, until the next craze of people coming here to smoke dope, so they were rolling up in the little wooden house and getting stoned fairly quickly. There were a lot of burn marks and eventually it got burned down.

Then more serious drugs came in and there were lots of people shooting up. So my morning run was to go out with a yellow sharps container, heavy duty gloves, and go around picking all the sharps up before the children could go out.

Drugs kind of stopped and alcohol began. There was broken glass everywhere, absolutely everywhere.

Around that period of time we had masses of breakins here (at the centre), every weekend nearly, I was up here at the weekends with one or another of the workers sorting out broken glass. We didn’t have any shutters round the back, and all of that developed as a response to all of the times the places were broken into. They used to get in and smash up the crèche, and break the bowls and spread paint all over the building, all kinds of stuff like that. It happened so much, it was really exhausting.

But running alongside all of that, we had two volunteers here, both of whom were really very nice men who knew an awful lot about birds and plants and they taught me so much about all of the things out there – and we’ve got jays, and ringdoves, and they still come here all of those birds and they still nest here in Tarner.

There’s lots of really interesting plants there too. It’s really lovely.

Tarner Park

by Tony Bell Over Tarner Park the sun rises Spiders spin silk surprises Mothers walk their children to school Traffic wardens enforce the rules Workers hurry to American Express Ants scurry through the grass Up Edward Street cars roar In police cells drunks snore Shoppers struggle up Carlton Hill The postman brings the daily bill The Albion Inn serves hot lunches Karate students practise their punches A herring gull raids the peace park bins At sunset the spiritualist service begins By moonlight a fox dines on pizza a la pavement A loan shark scavenges his weekly repayment Dogs lead owners in morning exercise Over Tarner Park the sun rises SEAN DE PODESTA reflects on the recent changes to Tarner Park.

I like Tarner Park which actually used to be quite edgy and frightening when it was full of graffiti.The Friends of Tarner Park have done a lot of work and actually made it a much better-used park.We’ve got photos…and when you looked at it (it was) like the slums of San Paulo or somewhere like that.

It only had one entrance so you felt if you went in you’d never get out. Even though (there was) the ball pitch, there were always people doing graffiti so you couldn’t play there necessarily. I think everyone when they were changing it would have liked some memory of the graffiti to remain; I don’t think they could come to agreement with the graffitists who, probably due to the nature of the activity, don’t want to be too sort of hemmed in really. My partner Debs is a secretary of the Friends of Tarner Park, so we’re quite involved locally in it.

Loan sharkp poster Milner and Kingswood Maisonettes / Chloe Howley

> Page 57

A lot of them seemed to be art students from London, you know people came down from London to see it and view it – pictures would change every month.

They spray it all and there’d be lots of cans around. They were spraying all the lampposts and stuff, so that was just making it really scruffy. I think graffiti in some ways is a fine thing, but very often it’s actually just vandalism, people that have their own creative quirk and discontent but then lose sight of what the park is for really.

Essentially they were just very fortunate to have had a few years of a place where they could exercise their art so freely. I think it’s much better used now since it stopped.

Community centres have always played a large part in the life of the neighbourhood. Here FRED RICHARDSON reveals what Brighton Boys Club at the bottom of Grosvenor Street meant to him.

I was there when the Prince of Wales opened it in 1929. I was ten years old and you couldn’t go to the club until you was 11, and Mr Tyrer was the local probation officer he served me in good stead. I was inclined to get into trouble then, being a tearaway. I was always in trouble – I was a villain. I didn’t give a monkey’s for nobody or anything, fight like a dog, so I had to report to the probation officer, but Mr Tyrer said, ‘If you behave yourself you can come to the club’. I said ‘Mum, I’m going to the club’.

It was fantastic – you could go there and go to the canteen and for a penny I could get a cup of tea, and Mr Sparks over the counter knew the state I was in, and he’d give you a tea and a big rock cake to go with it.

And that was the first time I went on holiday: they took us to the Olympia and we was all in the train and I can remember us singing, ‘We are the Brighton Boys’ Club, we know our manners, we spend our tanners.’

MOLLY GRACE feels equally strongly about The Girls’ Club held in Prior House,Tilbury Way – now the home

Richmond Heights / Chloe Howley

Knock on Any Door > Community

of Brighton Unemployed Centre Families Project and she was ancient, she was probably about 35 or 40. We the Resource Centre. kept saying, ‘Oh, she’s a bit old isn’t she?’

Anyway, she was marrying the vicar from the The one thing that saved my life and brought me church up the road, St John’s, and we thought everything happiness was the Brighton Girls’ Club. Miss Prior – her was going to be lovely, but when she got married she father took it on, then Miss Prior opened it. Miss Prior moved away with her vicar, and we broke our hearts. used to teach drama, that’s what I was attracted to, and we used to put on our little shows, and she said, ‘And now Molly Hayman’s going to sing’, and because – you MARION DEVOY also has fond memories of Prior know, girls go ‘Oh, no.’

House, but for different reasons.

I must have started (going) long before I went to work; I suppose I was about 12. We done lots of things: The Unemployed Centre wasn’t there then. It dressmaking, lots of things… was Prior House Community Centre which ran a crèche, She was wonderful. She used to ask me different further education classes, table tennis etc. I did my first things, because she knew what it was all about, all with ‘O’ level at Prior House in 1975, followed by two more. the family… But my mother used to say, ‘Keep your lip My daughter went to the crèche. buttoned up and don’t tell people your business.’ Because I think,because of the support and encouragement I loved to confide in her because she was nice; she loved of the tutors, some of us did end up at Sussex Uni. all the girls, she never made fuss of one more than the others, we all felt comfortable with her, and if you had any troubles at home she’d take you quietly somewhere For a short time in the 1970s Prior House hosted else so you could talk to her, she was wonderful. a social club. SALLY WOOD writes about her She took us to the Hippodrome and I saw Petula experiences.

Clark there one year …she took a lot of girls, about 30 of us used to go, not everybody wanted to go, but it was It was October 1979 when I met my husband a free one because Miss Prior used to pay for it… and at the social club in Tilbury Place which is now the we’d have a lovely tea.

Unemployed Centre. I can remember it as if it was We used to have a tuck shop in that place as yesterday. well, upstairs, for a few pennies you could have a hot I’d been going there for a while and had broken drink and something to eat. Wonderful, wonderful. up with someone else, who I had recently met there, But one day she said, ‘Girls, I don’t want any boys and had just come back from an 18-30 holiday after the hanging around outside, you tell them, “You’re not to break up. This particular Friday in October I went alone come to the Girls’ Club’’’ – she was very strict with us to the club. I wore a plaid skirt, which was a bit like and we used to mutter, you know. a kilt but without the pin and a silky turquoise blouse, ‘I don’t mind them standing down in Carlton Hill I’d bought the outfit with my birthday money, which I waiting for you, but they’re not to stand outside the Girls’ had just celebrated. I recognised a few girls at the bar Club, I will not have it girls – you’re not old enough to go and was chatting to them when I saw a couple of men courting around with boys.’ And we all used to giggle; but staring from across the bar.The one who was persistently she was lovely, she was a like a mum, lovely lady, beautiful. staring sent me over a drink via the barmaid, but I wasn’t One day Miss Prior said, ‘Girls, I’ve got an too impressed as I thought he looked like a convict! announcement. I want no giggling, no coughing, just sit Anyway 70s music was playing and, although I down and be quiet’ and then she came out with this can’t remember the song, I know we ended up having a bombshell: ‘I’m going to get married.’ Well we all thought dance. His name was John and he had recently moved

> Page 59

to Brighton after a divorce and insisted on walking me home to my house in Queen’s Park Terrace where I lived with my mother. We went out a few times and I remember him coming into the big new Boots store at the Clocktower, which had just been built, and where I was working as a beauty consultant.

One particular day I hid behind the counter and asked my colleague to tell him that I didn’t want to go out with him anymore. He didn’t give up and sent me some flowers, although they were sent to a house a few doors up the road. Anyway to cut a long story short this man became my husband and there begins another long story.

Same place, same club, different girl. JUDITH GREENFIELD danced the night away.

“Another Saturday night and I ain’t got nobody.”

Do I care? Not at all. I’m dressed in the best finery my meagre funds can run to and in my little clapped out old mini (aka Judith’s car of many colours due to the mismatched body panels I’ve had to make do with) I set off for the Carousel Club, Tilbury Place, Brighton. The radio’s singing a song specially for me, Sexy Eyes by Dr. Hook. I’m happy and hopeful but not out to find anyone special, so I tell myself.

It’s a singles club. I like it. I can go there on my own which I definitely prefer. I like to paddle my own canoe, I can moor up if I want to, or move on if the mood takes me.

It’s got a proper old-fashioned dance hall feel with a long bar to lean on, the lights are low and the music of the day is filling the space: Boomtown Rats, Pink Floyd, Queen.

I love to dance best of all. With anybody who’ll join me. Except for this one occasion. There’s this guy I love to watch dance. He’s such a gorgeous mover, but certainly not a looker. I’ve been staring at him for so long he’s come over to ask me to join him. I have to let him down gently, poor chap. Thursday nights they do ballroom. I can ballroom dance thanks to my dad and on those nights I have a partner, Chris. Not really my sort, he’s a race-walker, so he’s full of energy and got the wiggliest hips going.

Knock on Any Door > Community

Funnily enough though, the chap I fell for couldn’t dance to save his life. But there was something about him back then, I suppose, that led me to end up marrying him. Not my best move but, hey ho, life goes on. I’m on my own again, it’s another Saturday night and I’m still dancing.

BRIGHTON UNEMPLOYED CENTRE FAMILIES PROJECT The Brighton Workers Centre for the Unemployed opened its doors on July 11th 1981, based in Colebrook Road. The centre was organised, run and managed by a small group of volunteers. The Workers Educational Association and the Brighton and Hove Trades Council both played a role in setting it up. The first Christmas party was held in 1981 and has been a yearly event ever since.

The three main objectives in 1981 were: to provide advice about benefits for the unemployed and unwaged, to provide educational courses, and to provide a base from which unemployed people could organise themselves.

In 1984 the name changed to Brighton Unemployed Centre and we moved to our current address in Tilbury Place in 1985.

In 1986 the centre was awarded its first grant – it was used to employ workers at the centre for the first time. We became a registered charity in 1994 and our objectives then and now are to: Relieve poverty, distress and hardship amongst unemployed, unwaged and low waged people and their families living or staying in the Brighton area regardless of race, sex, age or sexual orientation.

We provide a safe and welcoming place and over the years we have attracted new funding which has allowed us to increase the number of services we offer.

We now provide: drop-in benefits advice a range of free or low cost educational courses from web design to yoga support for over 200 volunteer placements every week temporary housing support and family support low cost laundry facilities low cost computer facilities a hub for creative activity including exhibitions, arts, film, photography and writing projects a low cost vegan lunch every day a wholefood co-op an allotment free clothes, toys and books We have also produced a homeless guide to Brighton and Hove that is designed and distributed by people who are poorly housed.

The centre is consistently trying to find ways to address the changing problems faced by the unemployed and unwaged. Unfortunately the centre is needed now as much as it was 30 years ago when it first opened its doors.

JUDY SIMON recalls the early days of the crèche at the centre.

Ruth started to run a crèche. She and her partner knocked down a load of storage rooms – which is where the crèche is now, took it apart. He was a builder and she was a bricklayer – and they made it into a crèche.

I was teaching adults – child development – and she came on a qualifying course I was running. It was a year long and whilst I was doing it she asked if I would come and do some work here, teaching child development to the volunteers which she’d just started recruiting to work in the crèche. I said I’d do it for free as a volunteer.

I sort of dipped in and out between childcare and other activities. I did a six-week course for them here. So then Ruth and I became very good friends – and still are – and when she was leaving to go and do her B.Ed and I was teaching in the school, she said to me, ‘When your Milner Flats 2012 / Chloe Howley

> Page 61

contract finishes with the school, you could apply for this job.’ And so that was how that all happened.

I felt very strongly it was a very good place and a place I liked to be, a place where lots of things could happen and where people could genuinely be given the opportunity to become more politically aware, to become more involved in their own struggle rather than sitting back.

It’s organic; it’s brilliant. That’s what so good about it, it changes all the time.There are lots of different people all the time.

There was so much homelessness in Brighton and people were being put into hostels for anything up to a year or more. There was nowhere to go during the day and it was really bad. The housing situation was dreadful.

So we set up a temporary housing project, and we raised money for it, me and some of the other people who were here – they were all volunteers – spent weekend after weekend for I don’t how long. I learned all sorts of skills like how to lay concrete and stuff like that. Again Ruth who was the bricklayer got brought in to do the bricklaying and these other guys who knew lots about things laid lino and put the electrics in, we made a classroom and a toilet at the back. We put in a laundry where it’s now a classroom. It was all very rough and ready but there it was. We opened the first temporary housing project and it was brilliant… the crèche expanded and took more children. That was really good.

For YASSIN ZELESTINE the centre has been a gateway.

The centre has proved to be one of the foundations of my life in Brighton. I first went there 15 years ago for a vegan meal and joined my first creative writing class.

Since that time I have moved around in different roles within the centre: as crèche staff, teacher of art, dance and drama and computer room volunteer.The centre staff have supported me in developing my educational work and provide a friendly and welcoming space.

I appreciate the ‘safe centre’ policy, the standard of the classes is high and I have made lasting friendships The Centre 2012 / Chloe Howley

Knock on Any Door > Community

there. I have really enjoyed the arts collective, and having paintings in the annual exhibition. The welfare rights advisers are angels and provide a much-needed service in these times. I am proud to be a part of this organisation.

A Room At The Centre

by Josie Darling It is not a beautiful room More like a place Where detectives would take you for questioning Or Where you would be Chained to a chair While the room slowly filled up with water.

The View is one of a metal cage In front of a brick wall With fronds of ivy lurking round And The walls are the white of economy baked bean tins, The carpet £1.99 per metre Pens of the smudgy whiteboard never work But I love this cool room The writing group that meets in it Being away from my other life VALERIE MAINSTONE has been a volunteer at BUCFP since she retired. She was manager of the CAB (Citizens Advice Bureau) in Worthing and has worked for Oxfam, Age Concern and Women Against Sexual Harassment. In 1983 she became a mature student at Sussex University and was later elected president of the student union – not the first woman to hold that post ‘but certainly the oldest woman…’

The welfare rights group has been an important part of my life now for about 12 years.

Here we operate a drop in service and we try really hard to stick to that for welfare rights. I think it’s

accessible in a number of ways…We get an interpreter in from the Sussex Interpreting Service so it doesn’t matter what language people speak…we do provide a service to people who are perhaps finding it difficult to organise their own lives, who don’t organise their own paperwork…People who tip out a carrier bag of papers, unsorted, most of which the dog has chewed…

The centre has recently produced a guide for homeless people so that’s a great resource.

We get quite a lot of people who say, ‘Oh, I haven’t got my glasses, dear,’ so we are alert to the fact that people may not have literacy skills. People say, ‘Well, I’ve had this letter,’ and they are holding it up rustling it as though it’s on fire. We can say let’s have a look at it together, and we cdiffuse the situation and I think those occasions are not a waste of our time. We are always building a relationship where people can come back when something is more complex.

Sometimes it’s ancient history where people are way out of time to bring a complaint about employment.

I quite often have people say to me, well I understand that there’s nothing I can do about it now, but Valerie you are the first person who has really listened to me.

And that heartens me because I think that has value. It’s not always about fixing things, it’s about giving people that space for a listening ear.

We have our meetings on a Friday morning where we can all learn from each other and where we can let off steam if we have had somebody who has been a bit difficult or if we have felt stuck in our advice giving. We pool advice, we bring in press cuttings, things we’ve heard on the radio. We think about how we can deliver a better service.

We identify social policy issues and report them to local MPs and councillors…I am convinced that people don’t get the benefits to which they are entitled because it is so hard to apply for them and so hard to challenge decisions. One of the things I really enjoy and get a lot of satisfaction from is going to tribunals with people where they get something that they have been denied. The tribunal is able to say, yes, you qualify, this decision was wrongly made and we are going to put it right and you are going to get back pay.

> Page 63

We have a safe centre policy. Safe for everybody.

It does mean that people are judged by their behaviour.

It’s not a question of whether you look scruffy or whether you sound a bit rough, that’s not what counts, it’s how you behave. If you have had a lot to drink before you come in then as long as your behaviour is all right, no problem…

People are very clear, you can’t come in when you’ve had a skinful and abuse people, whether it’s drink or drugs or indeed whether it’s a mental health issue We are very, very pleased to help people with mental health issues. I’m one. It’s not them and us, I am a person with mental health issues and a mental health service user.

There are very few agencies that will take people through from soup to nuts, like filling in the form, helping them with the appeal, going to the tribunal with them… Some of it may be one off, we may never see the person again. In other cases we may be welcoming people into that office who (we) are going to have a very long relationship with…

If anybody wants to know whether we are worth funding, look at the volume of work that we turn round in the welfare rights group, look at the number of children who’ve been through the crèche, look at the people for whom this is THE cooked meal of the day, look at the people who are participating in the arts group and the writing group. We genuinely do attract and keep all sorts of people and I’m quite sure it’s because of the culture of the place, the safe centre policy, the confidentiality policy.

All of those things are in the DNA of this place.

There is a shortage generally of advice work across the city. We are getting loads of referrals from people like Brighton Housing Trust, CAB, loads of referrals from agencies that perhaps in the past used to do stuff themselves and can’t anymore because they’ve had to let things fall off the table.

We don’t let things fall off the table.

Knock on Any Door > Community

VALERIE has been part of the centre’s life in other ways.

I taught salsa here…and I’ve done Mind courses on living with stress which is quite helpful for someone with OCD. I have contributed to exhibitions, for example I put a piece of patchwork into an exhibition about peace and I put a photograph into an exhibition on Carlton Hill.

I was Mother Christmas – one of my proudest moments.

(Father Christmas) wears frameless spectacles so I wore mine and we looked like mother and father.

I spoke at the anniversary party when the centre celebrated its 30 years and one of the questions we were addressing then was why are we still here? And when I spoke I started by saying that I was still with Che Guevara and Thomas Paine in thinking that another world is possible, and I went on to say I felt that the centre was needed more than ever, because of the way the benefits system is changing, the way people are affected by not just unemployment but multiple deprivation and marginalisation...

I think the general standard of comfort and hygiene has improved beyond all recognition in the 12odd years I’ve been coming. It’s great that we got the money from the secret millionaire, wonderful to have a disabled loo.

But the hill is an absolute killer. One of these days I am going to die on Carlton Hill – and if I don’t die on Carlton Hill I shall die on the stairs coming up inside the building. We can put that on my tomb… I would love to see a lift, I really would. My ancestors lived on Carlton Hill so it’s only right and proper that I might die on it.

Rent Book / Donated by Sue Solly

> Page 65

Frank Gray in Kissing and Killing, an academic essay on Brighton in film, argues that Graham Greene played a significant role in creating a dark and dangerous image for Brighton as a whole and for the Tarner area in particular.

In Brighton Rock, published in 1938, he described the streets around Nelson Place as Brighton’s shabby secret behind a bright corsage. Gray maintains that in the novel and, to a lesser extent, the film a clear connection is made between crime and poverty. However, Greene later admitted that, ‘I must plead guilty to manufacturing this Brighton of mine.’

BERYL TUCKNOTT is still angry about the stigma attached to the Tarner area.

One chap – he’s gone now – used to say ‘Well you grew up in a slum’ – Oh I wanted to slap him. They talk as if we’re a different race – we’re not, we’ve all got one body, two arms, two legs and a head, and all the time I can use them – I’m using them.

PATRICIA GEORGE remembers that standards were high even when housing conditions were poor.

If you look at all the old pictures you’ll not see no rubbish in the streets… Everybody used to scrub their pavements and then whitewash the steps, and where the gutter is, clean all that out and put it in the dustbins for the dustmen.

It was just they called them slums because the houses were so derelict inside…people didn’t have posh clothes… you’d see them hanging on the line all tattered, but they’d all been washed and boiled.

Knock on Any Door > Community

FRED RICHARDSON felt he was treated differently because of what he looked like and where he came from.

I wasn’t allowed around Sussex Square in them days because it was very private.The police would shush you on your way; they’d see you there with no arse in your trousers and you was a nothing then. That got up my nose and I never forgot it. In every shape and form you were looked on as a scallywag and a no good and all the rest of it. We were not clean, we had rough clothes on, our clothes were dirty and where we’d been playing we’d probably be dirty ourselves and you got treated like that. Soul-destroying when you think about it.

JOSIE KNOWELDEN is also aware that the flats – Milner and Kingswood – once had an unsavoury reputation.

I think it’s faded out now, I think Moulsecoomb and Whitehawk have taken over now, you don’t hear nothing in the papers about the flats anymore; it was always the flats in the papers when I was a kid. The barrow boys used to fight and all that, but you don’t hear that now.There were loads of fights; it was something you were brought up with I suppose, you get to live with it.

RON BURTENSHAW remembers being instructed not to mix with children from certain parts of Tarner.

In particular, anyone from the Tarner Estate who were generally classed as undesirables, and untrustworthy.

This was a bit difficult for as I grew up, children don’t generally have barriers of their own and make their own minds up. If a boy was good at football, would I worry where he came from? NO. In his working life he noticed that the stigma of the slums lingered.

In 1963 I worked for the Borough Surveyor in the Architects Department. One day I was asked to design a disinfestations centre to be attached to Moulsecoomb

School. I queried why this was necessary and was told that it was because of so many lousy children in the area. I queried this because there was already a large disinfestations centre in Hollingdean Road, not very far away. I was told that it was because of the slum clearance – they had cleared the slums but the people were still the same. In other words they had built new slums behind a clean facade.

In May 1975 the local newspaper the Evening Argus ran an article which reinforced the idea that the area surrounding Carlton Hill was dirty and dangerous. … as rotten as the smell that drifts up from the market beneath them…It is said that Brighton police station was moved from the town hall to nearby John Street so the long suffering coppers would not have so far to go to catch the criminals… Abounding with people, dogs and cats at all times of the day … it will take more than a dab of paint and a wash of the walls to get rid of the flats’ reputation. After all, a leper can’t change his sore.

Such vicious reporting didn’t go unanswered: tenants marched to the Argus offices to demand an apology and a new association to represent their interests was formed. The newspaper gave tenants space to refute the allegations and voice their own grievances about poor estate management and maintenance.

Mattress / Milner and Kingswood Maisonettes / Chloe Howley Backyard / Milner and Kingswood Maisonettes / Jess Huffman

> Page 67

>

FAMILY

FAMILY “Monday was walkabout day – down to Edward Street to the pawn shop.”

Patrick George

Poverty forced FRED RICHARDSON’S family to be split up. He remembers the brother who was looked after by relatives.

(My brother and I) were born the same year.

It got too much for mother having two close together that my aunt took (him in), taking him only a few weeks old. He didn’t even know his name was Richardson. Her name was Legget, and she lost a son in World War I called Charlie, and he always thought his name was Charlie Legget. At the age of 14 my mother brought him back home to go to work and he just wouldn’t have it.

He was alien, absolutely alien. So he joined the Grenadier Guards when he was 16 years old.

MOLLY GRACE was born in 1933 in Cavendish Street.

I came bowling into the world in a two-up and two-down rat-infested slum house in the centre of

Knock on Any Door > Family

Brighton, pulled from my mother’s worn-out loins, the eleventh child, my mother Elizabeth Hayman, aged 47 years and widowed a few months before my birth.

And so my life began in the 30s when the world seemed to be struggling, my dear mother fighting against all odds so it seemed, to keep the children fed was a major task. They survived by becoming totters....

My mother was widowed before I was born. She was left with seven children. There used to be a Public Assistance Office, which is still marked on that wall when you go down Edward Street, the very end of Edward Street.

Well, what they did – and they used to do it to a lot of people – they’d come up, they’d look over the house and my mother said they used to say, ‘You can get rid of that bed, you can put four in that bed’, and ‘How many chairs do you want? Just buy a bench and sell your chairs.’ They never gave them nothing. Nothing. And she said, ‘Get out of my house!’

PATRICK GEORGE was born in 1925 and grew up on Richmond Hill.

Bottom of Edward Street – between there and Carlton Street – was the Parish House. Loads and loads of people had to go down there to get certificates so they could get food or clothes. They used to get a ticket and a grant to get a pair of shoes and they used to punch them so that they wouldn’t pawn them.

Monday was walkabout day – down to Edward Street to the pawn shop. They might pawn their sheets, or shoes, anything; they’d pawn that till the end of the week, till the old man got paid, and they’d have it out for the weekend and wear it. Then back in Monday.

It was quite normal, it was an accepted way of living. You never worried about it, as long as you had a pair of trousers to put on. I can’t remember ever being envious and saying, ‘Look at him, look at her, look what they’ve got on.’ I think you had other priorities then.

BERYL TUCKNOTT was born above a fish and chip shop in 1935.

My mum was serving fish and chips the night before I was born. But when I was a year old they bought a greengrocers’ shop at 1 Sydney Street (in the North Laine) and just before I was three, they bought a house in Ashton Street next to Ebenezer Chapel, so that was where I grew up, right in the middle of Tarnerland. Mum lost a boy before me, he was stillborn, and she didn’t have anymore.

We had a girl who looked after me and the house while Mum and Dad ran the shop and her name was Bessie. One of my earliest memories (was how) she used to run down Albion Hill – you know how steep it is – with me in a pushchair over the gratings that covered the basements, and I remember squealing with anticipation. She used to say, ‘Here comes another one!’

She was a lovely girl.

There was Mum and Dad’s room in the front and then my room in the middle, where I used to sleep with Bessie when she was with us. There was also what we called a split-room as well, which was my room when I was little and then in the middle was Mum’s front room and then there was a little back kitchen, and then the actual kitchen.

JOSIE KNOWELDEN’S parents met at Circus Street School and always lived in the area. She and her brother went to live with their grandmother when her mother and father died within two years of each other – Josie was still at school.

My mum had TB, and my dad had a brain haemorrhage, he was 42. He’d done a lot of boxing … I was 12 when Mum died and coming up to 14 when my dad died. But my nan always had us because my mum used to work full time, so we used to have to come and stay with my nan anyhow…she was lovely. When we used to come home from school there used to be all of us, my aunties’ kids and all that, she used to have all our jam sandwiches on the table for us – you know how Molly Grace

> Page 71

hungry you are when you come home from school, we all got a jam sandwich. My nan’s name was Alice Kelly.

I can just about remember my dad coming home from the war, from the army, he was in for many years...

He was under General Montgomery. He was in China, he won the boxing championships in China – he won a big long belt, I just gave that to my great grandson… A big navy belt, red, white and blue with a big silver thing on it. My dad used to box with bare fists on the pier.

My nan was actually pushing my mum at the side of the bed while she was giving birth to my auntie; she was pushing the pushchair to keep her quiet and she was giving birth. She had ten kids my nan. She was 76 when she died. She outlived four of them. She was a very strong lady my nan, very strong... I can see her now sitting down with her big pinny on, lift her pinny up and get her money-bag out from underneath her pinny…

Banks? We didn’t even know what a bank was – we never had enough to put in the bank.

EILEEN JONES recalls a family feud…

My father and his brother had dread words for many years (about) his mother, my grandmother. She was in dire straits for money and I don’t remember I was quite tiny then…there was a family conference for them all to put money in the pot to help grandma live… evidently my own mother must have found out that my father was putting more in the pot than anybody else and they applied to my Uncle Tom, my father’s eldest brother in India to help. He was a medical missionary and, of course, all he got back was ‘Our Lord will provide’ and it set off a whole family feud.

It was made up before EILEEN’s mother died I was about four, I can just about remember two or three things: I can remember her tenderness…

Then her father remarried.

Eileen Jones Warren Farm Eileen Jones and Husband to be going out together for the first time.

Knock on Any Door > Family

It was purely a marriage of convenience, for her and for him: for him, so that he didn’t lose his job and us children go into a children’s home, it was a home, it was his own, and she had a child, a daughter, the same age as my sister.

Growing up FRED RICHARDSON had only one set of clothes – the ones he was wearing.

No wardrobe, no chest of drawers, nothing like that. You come home and my mother washed our clothes overnight and they might be damp the next morning when you had to put them on. Them days you never wore no underclothes. All you had was a jersey and a pair of short trousers.

It was similar in RON JEWELL’S household.

We never had underclothes and things like that.

We had just ordinary trousers and that was it, and a shirt – we had no such thing as night clothes. At night we slept in a shirt. Pants, no such as thing as that. Poor old Mum worked hard, she took in washing.

In those days you wore plimsolls. They were black and when they wore out you put cardboard in the bottom, all the kids did it. They were cheap. We had a coat but most of the time we were in old pullovers and things like that, handed down.

JOSIE KNOWELDEN was only allowed to wear her coat on Sundays.

My nan used to pawn sheets, everything. Anything you possibly had you could pawn. That’s why we could only wear our coats on a Sunday: because they was pawned on a Monday. Then she used to get them out Friday. Bottom of Elm Grove there used to be two; there used to be one opposite The Admiral Napier; and there used to be one along Lewes Road. You’d have to queue outside on a Monday if you wanted to pawn anything.

Everyone along here went to the pawnshop. I suppose there was a couple who didn’t, but all in our crowd did.

We got coats from tally shops – Mr Marsh his name was, he used to come and collect money every Monday till my aunt paid for it. He sold coats, shoes, bedding, everything. My nan used to say, ‘If he knocks at that door tell him I’m not in’. Many, many times…He was all right (if you didn’t have the money) he knew he’d get some next week.

EILEEN JONES met her husband at Warren Farm children’s home in Woodingdean where they were both working. They had only known each other six months.

He was brought up in the nursery in a workhouse from three months till he was three and he can remember little red suits that they wore... Three years of age he was sent to the children’s home in Woodingdean, Warren Farm, and from then he stayed there until he was 15. Then he was put into Sainsbury’s Hostel in East Grinstead and learnt the whole of the grocery trade, everything. At 17 he went into the navy and while he was in the navy he had a letter from the superintendent of the home, having proved himself so good as a boy in the office and in the stores – he knew it off by heart – the person that was then storekeeper was leaving, he was offered the job and went back to the home, not living in it then – he was living with an aunt – and took up the work there… so he fell on his feet. … we had 100 children in that church at our wedding from that home and we knew every one by name.… we saved up within that six months, it took a lot of doing, we were scrimping and scraping…we managed to save £90 to get married on in that short while.

Feeding the family was a constant struggle for many before World War II. FRED RICHARDSON remembers the outside help his family sometimes received.

> Page 73

My father was a no good of the first description, I don’t like to say it, but that’s a fact. He’d come home, put my mother in the family way, and go again. That’s all it was and my mum literally adored him, she loved him.

He was a terrific money getter but only for himself, not for us, we lived in abject poverty, absolute poverty.

The dinner, if we were lucky, we got from a canteen at the top of Jersey Street. There used to be an old man, a boot mender, on the corner of the back street and you had to go to him to get the tickets and the teacher of Sussex Street School used to give me a wink a couple of minutes before 12 o’ clock, so we could get to the man in time for tickets. You got a pink one for dinner and a white one for rice pudding. I used to go to school with two basins under my arm wrapped up in an old pillow case or a piece of white rag, or whatever Mother had. The two basins were to collect the food in.

I’d say, ‘Mister, there’s another six of us indoors’ and he’d get me another pink ticket and another white ticket.

Whoever was serving, you might get a wink of the eye, and seeing the state you was in, get an extra spud or something. It was only a hash up. The rice pudding was terrible but then what could you do? Something’s better than nothing isn’t it?

the fridges like they’ve got today – so they had to auction the meat off, and they’d stand there and they’d get these big joints for about tuppence or thruppence and then that joint would take you right through the week. We’d have the roast on a Sunday, bubble and squeak on a Monday, stew on a Tuesday and shepherd’s pie on the Wednesday – that’s all with the same bit of meat.

RENE WOOLGAR remembers children gathering at the fruit and vegetable market in Circus Street.

PATRICK GEORGE enjoyed his food, even if there was sometimes a question mark over the meat.

A lot of little children used to go down to the fruit and veg for the cabbage leaves and apples and anything speckled and take them back home. It was all right if you washed it, you know. It fed the kids, didn’t it?

If you had meat at all it was always done in a stew because nine times out of ten it was risky. But I must admit that I’ve had better stews that you never get now…And you could smell it from the top of the road, from the street, and you got a whiff of it and that was it. Maybe it’s age, because as a youngster you’re always hungry and everything’s good to you when you’re hungry, and that might be the thing that gives you the different impression, but whatever was put in front of you, it was good.

PATRICIA GEORGE considers herself to be one of the lucky ones growing up.

My parents both worked and there was always something on the table.

On a Saturday, my mother used to go over to Gardner Street and they used to auction their meat off because they couldn’t keep the meat – they didn’t have

Knock on Any Door > Family

RON JEWELL’S father used to make a similar trip to the North Laine on a Saturday night.

My dad used to go over to Kensington Gardens.

They used to have a butcher’s over there that had an auction on a Saturday night and he’d get an aitchbone and sausage and breast of lamb for about three and sixpence. That was a lot of money – that used to last us for the week. Lots of times we only had enough. Mum and Dad used to always see that we got it, always did.

We used to have mostly soups and things like that. You’d get a turnip, and potatoes and onions, that’s the sort of food we had. You’d be surprised what my poor mum turned out with nothing. We had meat puddings now and again. Marvellous that was.

And there were also bargains to be had for those with a sweet tooth RENE WOOLGAR remembers.

And at the cake shop you could get a previous day’s bag of cakes for tuppence. You know they called them stale cakes but they were lovely.

Sometimes there were Friday night treats for FRED RICHARDSON and his family when they could afford to visit a local herring dees – a small shed or similar outhouse, perhaps even a dog kennel, used to smoke herring.

Just above us in Carlton Road there used to be a herring dees. If my mother had threepence we used to go and get three pennyworth of tie-tail. This was the herring that burst while it was being smoked.You smoked them with sawdust – you set light to the sawdust, hang the herring up and smoke them. Our mother used to say, ‘Ask them for the hard roe’ because they had a soft roe in them or a hard roe. They were gorgeous. That was a real beanfeast if we got that.

Mealtimes were happy times when DENNIS SMITH was growing up, although he used to worry about his mother.

She used to live on bread and jam and strong tea, never had hardly a thing to eat. I think she only weighed about five or six stone. But the food, it was like a banquet. She used to do for meals – everyday this is – soup, fish, roast and all the vegetables, looking back it was fabulous. She used to say to me, ‘Oooh, that kiddie up the road, I’m sure that kiddie’s hungry, bring the kiddie in.’

And I used to bring the chaps from where I was working, lunch time, because I worked just down the road from where I lived in the workshop and I used to bring them up and they couldn’t believe it, the food they used to put up on the table.

MALCOLM KEEPING remembers that the routine surrounding Sunday dinner rarely varied.

Fred Richardson and Family Ron Jewell and his Wife / Brighton Beach Amusements

> Page 75

Net Curtains and Windows / Tarner / Carlton Hill / Chloe Howley / Jess Huffman

Knock on Any Door > Family

Windmill Street / 2011 / Jess Huffman

> Page 77

You didn’t go out on Sunday; you sat down at one o’ clock to have your dinner – roast dinner, either lamb or beef. It was a very strict routine that mother used to impose. I remember she would get this semolina and we’d have to sit and eat that. It was terrible, like a paste it was; semolina or sometimes rice, and tapioca, which looks like frogspawn – we had to eat that. And of course I didn’t.

She used to do dumplings, which I wasn’t very keen on and bacon and suet pudding, I didn’t like that much either. But that was the thing: my father used to like them – all these stodgy old things with bags of fat in it.

Living between the sea and the countryside meant that there were sometimes other sources of cheap food.

Some were free if you had a head for heights as RON JEWELL describes.

We used to go and get our own (winkles) sometimes. We used to climb over cliffs at Black Rock, when they were cliffs.They’re not now, they’re all straight as a die now. You’d come home with your knees gashed and Mum used to say ‘You’re not going there no more.’

But we did. We used to climb those cliffs and think nothing of it.

FRED RICHARDSON remembers the poachers who used to go out on a Saturday night with little Jack Russell dogs.

They’d go into Stanmer Park and places like that, and used to creep in over night… We had rabbit before Christmas, if Mum had a few bob and Bill Robbins or one of the poachers (would be asked) – ‘Have you got a rabbit down there?’ ‘Yeah,’ and eightpence or tenpence for the rabbit.

Rabbits were sold in the street and had to be skinned: no problem for RON JEWELL’S family.

Patrick George Patricia and her father at St John’s Church before her wedding to Patrick George / Carlton Hill

Knock on Any Door > Family

They used to come round the streets selling rabbits – these were wild rabbits – they’d sell them for a shilling each, all in their skins. You took the skins back down to the rag-and-bone people and you got sixpence back off of that. My dad could deal with (the skinning).

My dad was an invalid but he was fantastic at doing things, he taught us a lot.

Keeping food fresh and away from vermin was a major challenge in RON house You made up a box with tiny holes in the front like a screen – a larder – and hung it outside.

FRED RICHARDSON’S mother found another solution.

You couldn’t put nothing in cupboards because of swarms of mice; all the food we had left over, or what was perishable, bread and that, my mother used to put in the big old iron oven. It was spotless, spotless. It all went in there otherwise the mice would have it.

Before antibiotics and the creation of the National Health Service the fear that haunted every household was illness. Keeping clean – as clean as possible in difficult circumstances – was the only protection. It didn’t always work.

PATRICIA GEORGE remembers her mother boiling sheets and giving them a blue rinse to turn them a brilliant white. Then they had to wash themselves.

During the week you had to strip-wash in the kitchen. They used to make sure my brothers wasn’t there when I was going to have a wash because you’d have to strip and wash yourself all down… and when I think back now, I think how did we do that? We done it, we’d got no choice.

Malcom Keeping on Motor Bike Rabbits For Sale

> Page 79

Knock on Any Door > Family

Homes of the interviewees / Chloe Howley

> Page 81

The tin bath was out in the yard hanging on the wall. My mother boiled buckets and buckets of water and we used to have turns each at having a bath, so my younger brother says, ‘I’m not getting in her water.’ My mother said, ‘She’s not dirty, you are! So, you get in that water…’

It was a similar routine in FRED RICHARDSON’S house.

The tin bath we used for a wash was the only bath we could have. My mother used to bath the girls downstairs in the bath, put the water in the copper and heat the copper up. But I used to get a penny if we were lucky and go to North Road at the public bath or St Luke’s for the public bath. They were so tight you couldn’t get much hot water.

‘Can I have some more hot water please?’

That was on a Saturday morning. Well, most of the time our bath was happyjacking under the pier and you had to dive into the sea. Good skin now you see – the salt water treatment.

All the children in RON JEWELL’S home had a Saturday night bath in front of the fire.

It was all clean for everybody. When we went to work, we didn’t bath in front of (the family) too big weren’t we? We used to go up to Park Street, there used to be a public baths…next door…used to be a big garage for South Down Motors, buses.

It was only a lot of cubicles as you’d go in and they used to put the water in and you’d say, ‘More hot, more cold’ that’s all. It was like a little room. And I always used to roll the towels up because ours were like rubbish.

They didn’t used to take the water off, they’d take the skin off.

I’m still a bath man, showers ain’t no good for me. So I’d have to get a bath in, marvellous.

Knock on Any Door > Family

BERYL TUCKNOTT’S home in Ashton Road had a plumbed-in bath – in the kitchen.

When they bought the house, my uncle was a plumber, he put a bath in with a lid on – health and safety would do their tank now – because the lid just hooked on the wall with one hook. All my mum’s pots and pans had to come off because they were all stored on there; and a big copper on the gas cooker at the top of the bath and they put me in and there’d be this boiling water behind me – as I said, health and safety would have kittens.

After the war Uncle Wally put in a geyser in to heat the water which used to spit and make horrible noises. But that was in a tiny little back kitchen with a little shallow brown sink and one tap.

When PATRICK GEORGE and his family moved into their new home in St John’s Place, they gloried in the opportunity to have a hot bath for a little while.

We had hot baths for a week until we found out we had to pay for the coal – for our fire. The backing of the fire itself was a block and two pipes from that come up into a tank, so when you lit the fire the fire heated the water and that circulated up to that and you’ve got your hot water and you’ve got it in your tap. So that was it, until the novelty wore off.

BERYL TUCKNOTT has vivid memories of what it was like when the wind blew in the wrong direction on wash day. Tamplins was a brewery in Southover Street that closed in 1973.

My mum had to dry her washing in our back yard, she had her mangle (and) this contraption of washing line with pulleys and she’d pull on one and then she’d grab another one and her washing would just go up and up and up…

Tamplins would start brewing. Of course, the chimney was at the bottom of the hill, and the smell of the brewing, I think you could get drunk on the smell.

She’d say, ‘That blimmin’ chimney again!’ and you’d see all this smoke coming out.

After her sister’s teasing MOLLY GRACE didn’t want to help with the washing.

(Mum) had a huge mangle out the backyard, and my mum used to say ‘come on’, and one of my sisters – well sisters always tease each other – she said, ‘You know what’s going to happen when you get older?’

I said, ‘No’.

She said, ‘You’ll have one big fat boob and one that’s skinny.’

It frightened me half to death so I refused to do the mangling after that.

Washerwoman

by Susi Oddball Oh it’s washing day again I hope I have not sent the kids to school in vain I don’t want them back till I have done That’s my two daughters and all my sons Sheets, shirts what a load of them to wash Cleaning collars for all the posh Scrub, scrub scrub scrub Clean, clean, clean Washing those rags To beam, beam, beam Hanging them up, but no wind blowing Scrubbing, cleaning washing glowing Fresh odours, smells nice I think Not like those fishy socks that stench and stink Light the fire put on the waste Throw in the wood, work in haste Scrub with sunlight Swish Rocket’s blue Pummel with the dolly Till the bubbles come through Put into the mangle, dry in the sun A nice cup of tea, now the washing is done Washing Pegs Home 2011 / Chloe Howley

> Page 83

Men came back from World War I physically and psychologically maimed. MOLLY GRACE’S father Steven was originally from County Cork and served in the Coldstream Guards.

Gassed and shrapnel in his head, he returned home to pick up the pieces of life and provide for my mother and the children. There were precious few jobs for the able bodies, my father had no chance, his health wasn’t good. My mother said he would sit some days vomiting in a bucket wedged between his legs and suffered terrible headaches, no help from anyone.

PATRICIA GEORGE’S father also fought in World War I and wasn’t expected to survive his wounds.

We kept all of my grandmother’s mail which said that they didn’t think he would live, and then the matron would write to my grandmother and say, ‘Oh, he’s improving.’The next thing is that they were trying to get a special grant for them to get over to see my father in hospital, because he was in France…and he couldn’t write because he was wounded in the arm and in the head and in the stomach and in the leg.

And when he come home, they wouldn’t give him a pension because he wouldn’t wear a special boot on his foot. He said, ‘No, it’s too heavy for me’, and because he refused to wear it, they wouldn’t give him a pension; and he went for years like that, without a pension.

He lived longer than our mother, he went years after my mother; and we always thought my father would be the first to go because it shook us when my mother became ill and the doctor said, ‘I’m sorry but there’s nothing we can do.’ He said, ‘I’m sending you to the hospital to see the specialist’, and my mother said, ‘I’m not going’ – she was determined she wasn’t going to go.

That was on the Sunday, and then my brother come up for us. ‘Mum’s in a coma’, he said ‘She’s not going to come out of it.’

Well, that was a shock; we went down and my father and brother was holding her, and she didn’t know Molly Grace aged 19 Sue Solly as a Baby

Knock on Any Door > Family

anybody and then after that she just gurgled and we knew she’d gone …

(The doctor) said, ‘We couldn’t have done anything because she’d wore the heart out.’ He said, ‘she’d worked too long.’

SUE SOLLY’S grandmother was just 28 when she died after drinking contaminated water on an outing to Hove. Now cured by modern antibiotics, typhoid fever is usually fatal if untreated.

She took my dad and his sister out to St Anne’s Well Gardens in Hove, where there was a well. She drank the water, got typhoid and died. My dad was three, so she died in 1923 then.

While disease was everywhere, some areas were much worse than others. In the mid 1930s the Brighton Medical Officer of Health took a close look at deaths in William and Henry Street for the ten year period from 1921 to 1931. When he compared the figures with the neighbouring working class area of Hanover and Brighton as a whole, an alarming picture emerged.

He discovered that while infant mortality (death of a child before the age of one) was 61 deaths for every 1000 live births in the town as a whole, for the district of Hanover the figure rose to 64. However, in the unhealthy streets of Tarner – just a short walk away – it was a shocking 102.

The death rate for bronchitis and pneumonia in William and Henry Street was double that in the rest of Brighton over that ten year period and it was trebled for tuberculosis (TB).

DENNIS SMITH knew whole families who died from TB. Just up the road on Carlton Hill there was a greengrocer’s, and I think most of that family died of it.

There was another girl in our class at school, I think most

of her family – whether she died, I lost contact with her in the end – but quite a lot of them died of it. At the top of Bear Road was the hospital there where all the cases were and it was full with people with consumption.

Described by historians as Britain’s killer disease, it is thought that three factors have helped to reduce the number of cases: the introduction of pasteurised milk in 1935 which kills at least 90 per cent of harmful bacteria, the introduction of vaccination (BCG) in secondary schools from 1953, and more effective drug treatment. However, cases have been increasing in most industrialised countries since the late 1980s.

RENE WOOLGAR’S elder sister contracted diphtheria, an often fatal disease spread by coughs and sneezes. Children were particularly vulnerable. Rene’s sister survived, but the illness had a life-changing effect.

My father died of an ulcer on the stomach which these days is nothing, but in those days it just got bigger and bigger, and he died when I was little, so Mum had three of us and you only got a widow’s pension which wasn’t much.That’s how she came to live with Granny in the Hand in Hand where I was born.

I had two sisters, Joyce who was two years younger than me, and Margery who was two years older.

Margery as a child had diphtheria, which was very bad in those days and she went to the Brighton Sanatorium Hospital at Bevendean. Marge didn’t have a good brain because of diphtheria. It really set her back, she wasn’t daft by no means, but she couldn’t catch up. It left her with a stammer. Oh, she was ill. We all had to have what we called swabs, Dr Clarke said, ‘you’ve got to have swabs taken.’ He put a thing in your mouth and we had to go off to the Royal York Buildings, to get these swabs, and luckily enough Joyce and I didn’t catch it. Dr Clarke came to us at home – lovely doctor.

Joyce wasn’t strong, so I did the errands for Mum, the chopped firewood from Sarah Scarce’s shop in Lavender Street and you took a basin and she’d fill it up with homemade pickles.

> Page 85

the night before a crumpled gutter plastic wasteland Haiku

by Yassin Zelestine Photo by Lorna Glynn

PATRICK GEORGE was sent to the school clinic when he complained of being cold.

I got a swab taken but I couldn’t go back to school again until it was developed. Instead of me stopping indoors which I should have done, I went up to Queen’s Park to the pond and they come up and they grabbed me, they’d been looking for me. It was my sister actually, ‘I know where he is, he’s always up there, I bet he’s gone up that bloody park.’

They took me down home, and the next thing (I remember) is the ambulance and I was taken up to the sanatorium. The two ambulance men, trying to get me up the steps, there was one on each side and I had my feet straight out on the step and they were going up the steps and I was absolutely stiff. Everybody knew diphtheria. The young boy in Tilbury Way died two weeks before that of diphtheria and in the end one chap said, ‘I’ll take him in’, so he put me over his shoulder and carried me up.

I was in there for eight or nine weeks I think it was. When you go in they put you up on blocks, the bottom on blocks so your head’s down very low and as you progress, as your health improved and they cured it, they took a block away and when you finally got down to no blocks you knew you only had another week to go and you could go home.

When you went in and when you come out you had to have this coal-tar bath. It was a general thing in town, if ever the man came to do any pitch-felting or anything, any kids had colds their mothers used to send them up to stand by the pitch-burner with a stick and breathe in pitch-tar, as much as you could.They reckoned that cured it. Well there must have been something in it because up the sanatorium you had exactly the same thing. It wasn’t in the bath itself – you’d never notice it in the water – but oh, it was overwhelming the smell of it.

Mind you it’s a smell that I like.

My nieces Jean and Pearl were in the next ward.

The wards consisted of the men’s ward, the staircase up and entrance to the women’s ward. When you were a patient all you’ve got was a pink coat that just came down to your bottom, not below your bottom, just to your bottom, never covered anything. I was a bit of devil

when I started to improve and when we were lying in the beds, when it was all nice and quiet, I used to get out of bed, run across... Sister caught me one day; she knew that my niece was in there and I had to walk out of my ward and all the way up the women’s ward and back again – that was my punishment that was.

Actually I was in a week longer than I should have been because when I was at that stage hopping across the ward, I got out one day and I was going home and the police – I can remember the cars, they were Wolseley’s – the police came up. They stood the other side and the sister and the matron and a chap who was one of the staff carted me back inside.

DENNIS SMITH’S sister was also admitted to hospital with diphtheria.

She got over it and came out. The only thing my mother said she noticed, she had thick black curly hair – all our family had thick black curly hair – and it went dead straight. A lot of it came out while she was in the hospital. And my mother said, ‘I can’t believe that’s her, I can’t believe that’s Bella.’

RON BURTENSHAW’S sister had a number of serious health problems that contributed to her early death.

Polio was once a frequent cause of death and paralysis all over the world. In England, there was a widespread outbreak during the 1940s and early 1950s. Due to the introduction of a polio vaccine in 1955, the number of polio cases has been dramatically reduced.

Since 1998, there have not been any reported cases of polio in the UK. Anne was a sickly child who suffered a hole in the heart, later to develop polio. She could not control her balance and in consequence fell down a short flight of stairs at the place where she worked. Basically she was unhurt, but taken to hospital for observations. Within two days she was dead, aged 23.

> Page 87

There were also cases of lockjaw, the popular name for tetanus, a serious condition that develops from an infected wound. It is one of the few conditions that offers no immunity even if you have suffered a serious attack. Thanks to vaccination, however, it is now rare.

DENNIS SMITH remembers when it was an ever present danger.

One boy who I was in class with, his father, up the Race Hill, Sunday, they used to have whippet racing and his father used to fire the gun to start them off and he injured his hand with a gun, something went wrong, turned poisonous, and he died of that.

Then there was another chap I worked with when I was a carpenter, he was ill and off work a long time, and we made a joke of it at the time: we said, ‘what’s been up?’ and he said ‘I’ve had lockjaw, I’ve been so ill and I couldn’t move my mouth.’ They took him in hospital and he got over it and he came back. Many years after, he was working at the old football stadium (Goldstone ground in Hove). They were renewing the seats out there and sometime after I saw in the Evening Argus, CARPENTER DIES OF TETANUS – it was the same chap and he obviously had the virus or whatever it was, the germ in his blood system, and the same chap he died from it.

We never had the injections which they give you now. When I worked on my own I was doing an ice cream parlour down West Street, I was pulling all the floorboards out and cut my hand, it came up like a balloon. I went to the hospital and they took me in straight away and gave me all these injections. They said, ‘You’re lucky, you could have died of tetanus.’ Of course since then I’ve kept it up.

One of the last outbreaks of smallpox in Britain occurred in Brighton Christmas 1950. An RAF officer flew to Scotland from Pakistan and then travelled by train to stay with friends in Brighton, a taxi driver and his daughter who worked at the telephone exchange.

Thirty cases were recorded and ten deaths. RON BURTENSHAW remembers a black cross painted on his grandparents’ front door in Islingworth Street

Knock on Any Door > Family

because his aunt worked at the laundry where suspect bed clothing had been washed. Public meetings were cancelled and some shops only opened for a few hours a day. St Luke’s School was closed and nearly 86,000 people were vaccinated – over half of the town’s population.

Patients were treated at Bevendean Hospital, which had been built in the 1880s to deal with a previous smallpox outbreak. In 1979 the World Health Organisation announced that smallpox had been eradicated throughout the world.

In the absence of effective drug treatment, anything that claimed to be preventive medicine was popular with mothers. FRED RICHARDSON remembers a man who used to ride a bike shouting out ‘white oils’.

That was the only doctor you had. You used to buy sixpenny worth of white oils and you used it for everything – for the flu, double pneumonia. My mother used to swamp us with it if you had a cold, on the back and on the front. The cold couldn’t get out if it tried, anyway.

I don’t know what it was, just white oils. He used to have a bike with the stuff in the front and he put it down one day and me and my brother nicked the bike and we flew down on Carlton Hill and we smashed it to pieces.

BERYL TUCKNOTT remembers the doses dished out to small children every week.

During these early school years I was given a dose of syrup of figs, or even worse, brimstone and treacle, which was mixed together like a paste and then chewed till swallowed.These laxatives were administered every week when I was given my weekly bath… most children were given them whether they need it or not.

It was healthy I suppose; my grandmother had ten kids and I think her kids (had) to have it, so their kids gave it their kids. It was horrible: bright yellow brimstone and

treacle. I didn’t mind the syrup of figs but the brimstone and treacle was horrid. …We were also given cod liver oil and malt, which I loved, as did my cat who always liked to lick the spoon. My friend was very small, so was given an extra jar. We used to collect it from the school clinic in Ivory Place.

RON JEWELL’S mother died in 1943 while he was away on active service, the same year that he lost his brother and brother-in-law fighting in the war.

They were worn out in those days mums. They never had a chance.

FRED RICHARDSON used to worry about his mother.

I can see her now, she used to suffer very badly with migraines, terrible, and there were no antidotes for it then. She used to get vinegar and put it on her head and next door was Bella Rustigani, an Italian, and she used to take snuff and she used to say, ‘Better give you a pinch of snuff ’ and it used to take her headache away.

Grandparents could be an important influence and through memories collected and recorded we can explore what ageing meant in the past.

SHIRLEY TIDEY remembers her grandfather with great affection even when he was causing problems.

He used to make people laugh because when he was younger he used get drunk down The Lanes somewhere and he used to come home and he used to be absolutely blotto drunk and he used to get to Elmore Road and sit on the wall and then Mrs Joel and one of the family used to come up and say, ‘You better come down and get your dad, he’s on the wall again going to sleep.’

Then when he got up home he used to empty his pocket and throw (his money) all up in the air in the John Tidey Aged 18 or 19 and Baby Susan – Tarner Road Shirley Tidey and Baby Cousin Alan / Tarner Road

> Page 89

street and of course the kids used to scramble for it and the next day he used to say, ‘Where’s my money gone? I know how much it was I had there.’ He used to ask for it all back, but of course the kids used to keep it.

He was a real character but the worst part was when he used to mend his (fishing) nets, and he used to put them across from one side of the road to the other and anybody come along he used to say, ‘Wait, go around the other way’ and they used to.

FRED RICHARDSON’S grandparents were the oldest couple in Brighton at one time.

Ninety eight years of age, both. Their name was Richardson and they lived in 47 Park Crescent Road. My father’s father was a coal merchant. He had a coal yard opposite Southampton Street, opposite Islingword Road.

He learnt me to play crib, I think that’s how I got my knowledge of figures – it’s a numbers game, and learnt me that when I was nine or ten years old.

He had a lot of money I suppose, 200 or 300 pound which was a fortune, because he’d bought his house for about £47/£48, something like that – new – it was a lot of money.

He lost his money in Farrow’s Bank, used to be at the bottom of St James’s Street, and they went broke.

Otherwise we were quite well to do, from my father’s side – my mother had nothing.

Farrow’s Bank called itself the People’s Bank and offered a different style of banking service. It published daring adverts suggesting that every woman should have her own cheque book and in 1910 opened a branch entirely managed and worked by women.

When it crashed just before Christmas 1920, it had over 70 branches across the country. The directors were jailed for fraud and customers like Fred’s grandparents lost most of their savings.

MALCOLM KEEPING’S grandparents also lived to a good age.

Knock on Any Door > Family

My grandfather lived to 93, and I think that was the early 60s. My grandmother was 89 when she died, a number of years before my grandfather. They had lived in Number 77 Albion Hill since the 1920s. They lived (in their own home) all the time. It worried the neighbours considerably because my grandfather would keep putting newspaper and wood on the fire and almost set the chimney alight, and the people were worried that he was going to catch the house alight. He went into the Brighton General, and he was only up there a short period of time, and he died.

RON BURTENSHAW’S grandfather didn’t appreciate the Salvation Army’s brass band playing in the street on Sunday afternoons.

Quite often this band would cause annoyance to the male population that enjoyed a quiet snooze in the afternoon, after a well fortified lunch, via the pub.

I remember the story of my grandfather who lived in Lennox Street. Upon being woken from his slumbers, he went into his back yard and hurled his dustbin lid over the roof of his house.The lid hit the bass drummer who was standing in the street, but nobody knew where it came from.The Sally Ann never played outside his house again.

SALLY WOOD belongs to the oldest fishing family in Brighton. As a baby she lived above a car sales room on the corner of the High Street and St James’s Street where her father bought a Jaguar once owned by the 1960s singer Matt Monroe.

My godfather, who sold cars there was also a good artist and painted murals on the walls inside the pub the Royal Oak also in St. James’s Street.

My mother’s maiden name was Mitchell and not only did they catch the fish they had stalls on the fishmarket hard and then the London Road Open Market.Their last family home was Egremont Place and my uncles told me that as children they often played down Carlton Hill.

Watching Brighton Rock also brings back

Claremont Row. Looking south from Richmond Street to Sussex Street. The building on the right is Richmond Street School. Hemmed in between Claremont Place at the back and Claremont Street in front. From the James Gray Collection, the photographic archive of the Regency Society.

The Tidey Family wedding

memories as I know much of it was filmed there and my father who was a stunt man played a part in it.

Religion in one form or another played an important role in Tarner life before and after World War II. RON JEWELL was allowed to make up his own mind when he was 16, but when he was young he was sent to Sunday School at Ebenezer Chapel in Richmond Street.

RENE WOOLGAR’S Sundays were fully occupied.

Sunday morning, before we went to Granny Page’s, I’d have to get up and go to Holy Communion at church, and then back home; then up to Granny Page’s, and in the afternoon, Sunday School, and then back home; and then my eldest sister Marjory and I used to go to Bible classes in the evening – so all day Sunday.

The old boy used to pump the organ in those days to keep the organ going. He used to work for Bennett’s along North Street – because Old Bennett used to be one of the heads of the Church – so it was part of his job to do the organ.

RON BURTENSHAW says that the Sabbath was always respected in 1950s Tarner.

The streets were quiet as there were very few children about. In my household we were not strictly religious but we were taught Christian principles.

My mother had a very Christian outlook to life and encouraged us children in the same manner.We attended the local parish church of St John’s Church in Carlton Hill, as well as afternoon sessions at Sunday school in Carlton Hill. No comics to be read – only the classics (I never did understand ‘Kidnapped’). The evenings we could only listen to the radio, and that was restricted to ‘Sunday Half Hour’ or the ‘Palm Court Hotel’ and then it was early to bed.

MALCOLM KEEPING used to go to Dorset Gardens Sunday School We were all made to go to Sunday School, terribly boring time I thought. I was christened Catholic up at St Mary Magdalene’s, and there I was going to a Methodist – Dorset Gardens.They didn’t mind, they said, ‘It’s all right, he can come in.’

> Page 93

SHOPS & TRADERS

to give him a jug or a cup or whatever you got to put the milk in.

EILEEN JONES remembers the many shops within walking distance of her home, including one that was exclusively for cats…

SHOPS & STREET TRADERS “Mr Sainsbury offered him the manager’s job in a place with space and sea...”

Ged Duncan

Tarner was once self sufficient in dairies, milk shops, greengrocers, sweet shops, a-bit-of-everything shops and branches of national chains: its streets were once noisy with the cries of men and women pushing barrows and selling their wares.

Jane’s Milk Shop was at the corner of PATRICIA GEORGE’S road when she was growing up in the 1920s and 30s.

There was a big archway, and they had all the cans of milk and people used to go in there to get a jug of milk. You didn’t have any of the bottles then, you’d go and get it in a jug. A chap came down and he had a big bucket, a milk tram, and he had a scoop, and he’d pour you out what you wanted and scoop it and you’d have

Knock on Any Door > Shops & Street Traders

…all the shops you could imagine at the end of Steine Gardens. There was the cats’ meat shop, where they’d bring the dead horses and cut the meat up in there and sell it in a funny old shop. There was the bakery, and we used to go in their yard and watch him kneading bread or putting the bread in the oven or taking it out, hot cross buns and things like that; in fact we were fortunate enough, we were friends of them, most Sundays my brother and I would be invited in there for our tea and it was nice, and that was in the downstairs back of the shop; back in the sitting room, it was a beautiful sitting room they had, and they had a massive great high cabinet that was a record player, with all records… a beautiful fireplace with a high fender and two seats each side.

Corner of William Street there was a big butcher and you saw massive, great big piles of big meat going there; the floor was all sawdust and you saw the blood coming out of these animals hanging up in the shop, quite grim. Up from there, there was a pawn shop, a sweet shop, another bakers, small pub, then up further was Salvation Army Hall, a Do It Yourself shop which was called Dockerills, a dear elderly lady ran that with her sons (it is still a family business but is now located in Church Road, Brighton).

Up above there, there was a big, big, really big pub called The Globe, a massive great globe hanging outside. A wee bit further up there was a Freeman and Hardy Willis Shoe Shop, another cake shop, that was up from White Street. A chemist who was a dear old fellow was very, very clever in there helping everybody as good as a doctor.

MOLLY GRACE and her sister didn’t want anyone to know what they were sent to the butcher’s to buy.

We used to ask my mother to write it down because we were so embarrassed. Me and Iris wouldn’t say the word because we thought it was really rude.

We were really shocked one day when there was another man – not the old man that used to serve us – and we gave him the paper and what did he do?

‘Fred! A pound of udder!’ We went scarlet in the face.

You could have put soles on your shoes with that udder and they’d have lasted the year, that’s how tough they was. She used to boil it to death with onions and that, and my brother, well, he just used to eat it, but we just used to nibble a bit… when my mother had hardly any money, that was udder day, because it was so cheap.

Hygiene wasn’t always what we would expect today.

JOHN STEVENS remembers one particular shop.

We used to go up there and you’d get seven pound of potatoes and in them days the potatoes used to come out of sacks covered in dirt and he would weigh you up seven pound of potatoes, tip them in your bag, because he never scooped them out and then you’d say a pound of cheese – if you had enough coupons – and he’d get hold of the cheese with his dirty hands and he’d rub the cheese off with his fingerprints on there…and you’d go in there and buy a cream bun, and he’d pick up the cream bun, so we wanted two cream buns, he’d pick up the first cream bun and give you that, cream on his hand, he’d lick the cream off, then pick the other one up.

Many remember Sainsbury’s in St James’s Street.

DENNIS SMITH’S mother went shopping every morning.

My mother used to shop mainly in Sainsbury’s, but the other shops all did the same.The bulk of the stuff was all open on show, all the dried fruit and stuff that was all in bowls so they just took it out as you wanted Shop Signs 2011 George Street / Edward Street / Chloe Howley

> Page 97

it: raisins, currants, figs, apricots. All the porridge and that, they used to get that out of big containers, I think it used to come in sacks, then they’d put it in containers and you’d get out what you wanted.

They used to have the big sides of bacon in Sainsbury’s and they used to cut the bacon off with the machine, slice it while you were there. Then there’d be one side fish, which you’d pick out what you wanted then they’d fill it up for you. There was always fish on the menu at home.

GED DUNCAN’S grandfather managed the St James’s Street Sainsbury’s for nearly half a century. Ged interviewed him before he died and replayed those tapes for the first time for the Tarner history project.

Bowler Hats and Butter Pats The biography of SIDNEY WELLS by Ged Duncan How do you keep a bowler hat on when you are riding a bike? My hat only needs the slightest breeze to blow it off my head. My grandad cycled to work in all weathers, wearing his hat and suit. His hat stayed on. In 1935 he’d become manager of a butcher’s in St James’s Street, Kemp Town, on the corner of Dorset Gardens.

Many of his customers lived in the Tarner area.

In 1990, a few months before he died, I recorded him reminiscing about his life – from his childhood in rural Norfolk to running the Brighton shop through the war and until the 1970s. Recently I listened to the tapes again and read a bit about the area at that time. I was fascinated by the way the shop itself provided its own story which reflected events and change happening in the wider world.

Granddad’s name was Sidney Wells and he was already the manager of a butcher’s by the age of 26. Not bad for a lad who started work as a farm labourer at 13.

He was married, with a young family, and lived over the shop he ran in Ilford. It was owned by a small family firm.

The name might be familiar...it was called Sainsbury’s.

In the early 1930’s Sainsbury’s was still a small business, dealing mainly in butchery and dairy. John

Knock on Any Door > Shops & Street Traders

Sainsbury himself interviewed granddad for the Ilford job and later it was the boss who noticed that Sidney had filled the back yard with sand so his children had somewhere to play.

Mr Sainsbury offered him the manager’s job in a place with space and sea – Brighton, Kemp Town.

The family moved into Bolsover Road in Hove. On the rare occasions he didn’t cycle to work, Sidney travelled through town by tram, completing the journey on the No 42 trolleybus which ran up St James’s Street.

Once at work, he put on white sleeves with an elastic top and a white apron. My grandma, Frieda, had to wash these – white cotton covered in dried blood from the butchery. There were eight butchers under Sidney, as well as women serving the dairy and cheese, delivery boys and office girls. For those having meat delivered, it was carried to them loose in the front baskets of the bikes.

In those early days, and during the war, a long counter ran down either side of the shop, and customers had to queue for each item in turn. Butchers and counter staff were required to be above a certain height and immaculately turned out. The management even visited employees’ accommodation to check that it was respectable. Some people still remember their butter being cut and measured with two wooden pats and then meticulously wrapped. Once people had queued for each item, they then had to queue again to pay. A practice common to shops throughout the land, so it’s unsurprising that shopping and queuing became national British pastimes.

Rationing in wartime meant the queues were even longer. Butchery was an exempt and essential trade, so Sidney was not called up, but five of his staff were – and women took their jobs. Grandma Frieda went into the shop to do the ration books. There were 5,000 customers, so it was a big job. When there was an air raid, Sidney pulled down the wooden shutters and led the customers who happened to be in the shop at the time down into the cellar. Sometimes he wouldn’t even leave his post, and hid under the counter instead.

One night a week he stayed at the shop for his duties as a Fire Warden. And although he wasn’t involved directly in the aftermath, he remembered vividly the day

Cruet Set / Café St James’s Street Brighton 2012 / Chloe Howley Fresh Eggs Box / Mike Watts Fishmonger 2011 / Chloe Howley

> Page 99

Shopping St James’s Street 2011 / Chloe Howley

Knock on Any Door > Shops & Street Traders

a German Dornier bomber, being pursued by a Spitfire, dropped its load on Kemp Town. Fifty two people were killed, including four children. The incident made him even more determined to protect his own family, and he described at length building shelters at his home in Hove.

Sidney worked in the shop until he retired in 1975, and in that time Sainsbury’s went from being a prosperous family business to emerging as the corporate giant we know today. It’s ironic that locals were campaigning against Sainsbury’s ‘moving into’ St James’s Street. How many know it was there before, and that it then epitomised the small, locally-run, locally-sourced outlet that we are beginning to value again today?

In the early 1950s the company introduced a strange new idea from America: self-service supermarkets.

The changes baffled and saddened my grandfather. By the 60s Sidney’s butchery had been converted into a supermarket by merging it with the grocer’s next door.

His role was diminished. He did his butchery out of sight, his relationship with the customers removed.

But he retained a fierce loyalty to the company to the end of his life. In my childhood, I remember him sitting at the table at our house having tea, examining the labels and price tags to check that the goods had been bought at Sainsbury’s. If something had no evidence of its provenance he would check with my mum, just to be sure. She still shops there.

Nowadays I often go to the Kemp Town and Tarner area, sometimes for classes or socialising, but also to go to the Redroaster Café where I enjoy music and spoken word gigs, and to read my own poetry.

This building used to be the post office, a magnificent building a few shops down from where Grandad used to work. His butchers is a now a pharmacy, and now has apartments above it.

My grandad soon saved up for a better hat, and was very proud of the Homberg that replaced his bowler. But I’m still mystified as to how people of his generation managed to keep their hats on. Women had hat pins. But the men? Perhaps my grandad’s bespoke hat fitted him better than mine from the market. Or perhaps he wedged it on. Secured it firmly with something he had to hand. Like a wedge-shaped wooden butter pat?

In the years when Sidney Wells was inspecting his staff’s accommodation, the milkman doing his rounds was a source of entertainment for children remembers EILEEN JONES. He had a brass cup on a long handle that hooked onto the sides of the churns, the great big churns, I can remember a pint, a half pint. Most unhygienic, the milk, can you imagine, hot weather, no fridges.

A horse and a cart, not too big, quite contained, not a massive great thing and then the people come out with their jugs to be filled.

Like many others JEAN COLLINS associated Sundays with winkles.

When we lived at Sussex Terrace, we used to have people come round selling winkles on a Sunday afternoon, and there used to be one come round with a horse and cart. When I was little I used to stamp my foot at this horse and one day it stamped back; ever since I’ve given horses a wide berth.

BERYL TUCKNOTT thinks back to those Sunday afternoons with fondness.

It was my job to get all the winkles out: wash them, put them in a basin, vinegar, salt and pepper. Oh that was Sunday afternoon tea – that were lovely on Sunday, winkles – make them into a sandwich.

JOSIE KNOWELDEN remembers ‘winkle-picking Kelly’.

She used to come Sundays and sell the winkles, that’s what we used to call her, she used to live in George Street. Everyone waited in for her Sundays to buy her winkles, best winkles in Brighton she used to sell.

> Page 101

RENE WOOLGAR remembers other traders who sold their wares street to street or from home.

There was the Facendas with his barrow with the ice-cream, he was Italian, beautiful ice-cream and that was the time the Gizzi Brothers had the first icecream parlour in St James’s Street. They were all Italian but beautiful ice-cream. I think it was just vanilla and strawberry.

There’d be the muffin man, he used to have a tray and he’d carry it on his head. Toffee apples, oh that was from Polly Alley – Apollo Terrace it was really – and this lady along there, she made lovely toffee apples for a penny, on a stick, a wooden stick, and you could go and knock her door for a penny toffee apple – she cooked it in the house.

Coalmen had a dubious reputation, recalls DENNIS SMITH. I think you used to have to order it and then they bring it round, have a tonne or half a tonne or whatever it was. Some of them had horse and carts, they used to take it off on their shoulder, and you always had to watch, people always watched because they’d do you out of a sack. Yes, always on the fiddle, they said, the coalmen.

In the winter time PATRICK GEORGE says that Albion Hill was a hill too far for the coal carts.

People were very good in the winter when the ice and the snow come, because they wanted the coal.

You’d see them out pushing the cart with the horse and that in it, to get round little bits.

They couldn’t do Albion Hill. They’d go along the bottom bit with the railings and try and get up that first bit to Tracey’s Yard but they could never do that. They used to just leave the cart there and you had to go down and take a bag down and get what you wanted and you had to go and help get the coal.

Sweet Receipt / Coal Receipt / Sussex Post Card Club / Ice Cream Sign Brighton Seafront / Chloe Howley

Knock on Any Door > Shops & Street Traders

MOLLY GRACE and her sisters and brothers sometimes used to get coal from a shop in Riding School Lane.

We used to take a coal sack and we also took a pram because we couldn’t carry the coal up, we were too small and too young. There was a woman who used to do it, she was like that, like a rusher of wind. Her name was Mrs Poor, she used to shovel the coal, put it in a sack.

I couldn’t even shovel the coal up, she was skinny as a rake that woman and yet she used to shovel it and we always wondered how she done it, how she could do it, because it was like a man’s job.

And sometimes poverty forced them to look elsewhere.

And then another time, Mum said ‘Oh we haven’t got a bit of coal in the house, I don’t know what we’re going to do’; so my brother Victor said, ‘Mum, there’s a road works down the bottom of Carlton Hill,’ and there used to be a little man who used to have to sit in his little hut guarding all the stuff that come out the road because it had to go back when it was re-tarred; well it was all wooden blocks, and it was all fitted with tar… we pinched some, me and Iris, for our mum’s fire.

When she put it on the fire, all the bits of tar came out – ping, ping, ping – because it was all melted…

Then we went down one night, and this man caught Iris, he shook her like a bundle of rags, he said ‘You have been taking the tar-blocks, they’ve got to go back, I’m going to report you’, and he shook her like a rag – I was trying to hold my sister, so do you know what I done?

I went round the back of him and pulled his trousers down, so he’d let my sister go. I dragged his trousers down and saw his bum; my mum said, ‘That man never wore underpants’ she said, ‘the dirty beast.’ She did.

In the early years of the car industry, Henry Ford is reputed to have told customers that they could have any colour they wanted – as long as it was black. RON BURTENSHAW remembers a house painter with a similar philosophy.

> Page 103

Mr Braddy, who lived in Richmond Street, two down from the fish and chip shop, worked at the carriage repair shop for BR at Lancing. He would paint your house, providing you did not mind the colour being Malachite Green – the colour of Southern Railway.

MALCOLM KEEPING remembers when batteries had to be recharged at a local shop.

radio

My grandfather hung onto the accumulator radios for years and years, he’d go in the front room, tune it in so that they could listen to Home Service or light programmes but he was sticking to the old ideas.

He objected to having electricity in the first place, but he was overruled and electricity was installed in the house just before the war.

He was just anti-progress, he didn’t believe in anything like that so everything was batteries and accumulators.The shop that used to charge the batteries was at the corner of Richmond Street and Queen’s Park Road. It’s now just a normal house, but it was Peters’ the Radio Shop. The Peters’ family were two sons, one ran the electrical shop selling radios and charging batteries and in later years he even sold televisions. His brother did all the coal business in this area, Peters’ Coal, and they had two or three lorries delivering sacks of coal.

In 1937 Circus Street Market was built as part of the slum clearance programme on a site that was once occupied by St Margaret’s Mission Hall and numerous small houses. It has been derelict since 2005 and is now inhabited by pigeons.

As a small child in the late 1970s and 80s CHLOE HOWLEY would sometimes go shopping with her grandparents who lived in Richmond Heights.

We would head down to the London Road to the Co-op. It seemed so exciting to me as it was so big: a shop that seemed to sell everything my grandparents needed. We posted things, bought food, clothes and had Co-op Saving Stamps

Knock on Any Door > Shops & Street Traders

tea. I remember marble and brass handrails. They used to save stamps from shopping and one of my favourite things to do afterwards was to sit and lick and stick the stamps into the books. I felt really proud doing this as it seemed very important. They said if they saved the stamps they could buy something special.

One of the best presents I received as a child was a cassette player radio. It was rectangle, grey and black with a handle – very basic with a few buttons. I absolutely loved it. It opened my world. I listened to lots of story tapes in my room and at night discovered that I could listen to the radio really late and on low volume.

I remember realising that the red button meant I could record my favourite songs from the radio onto tape. I loved it and now wonder if it was bought with saved coop stamps.

Although the London Road Co-op department store has closed, along with the many small shops, some streets on the fringes of Tarner have retained a special flavour. Former marathon runner SAM LAMBOURNE has a sports shop in George Street.

I think every shop in this street is independent.

When you are independent you’ve got to look after your customers.You know you can’t be corporate about anything, it’s got to be personal. It’s a stand-alone street.

It’s got one of everything in it and everything that’s in it is interesting. I sit with Barry (Windham who runs Pullinger’s shoe shop at the other end of the road.) and have a coffee at the end of the week and complain about everyone. It is what you need to do when you work in a shop with the public that’s the one thing you need to do.

I think St James’s Street is one of the last of those sort of streets to go corporate you know. Edward Street is so dead, it’s dual carriageway and it’s industrial and there’s absolutely no way anyone would walk there.

There’s the court buildings and you know the dole office and they’re just bland buildings.

It must have been ’83 when I first came to this area…I was trying to design, but for my bread and butter I went around the hotels and did repairs to aprons – 50p Co-op Saving Stamps

> Page 105

an apron to just repair a hole in it and sheets... I would go and get a bag and spend a morning or an afternoon repairing them and get 27 50 pences which in the 80s was quite reasonable.

A guy I went around with had Uncle Sam’s up at West Street and he said he was putting a new shop front in and I said, ‘Oh I wonder if that shop front would fit’ so I measured it and put it in here. I worked in California and San Diego in a running shop and I thought, ‘Oh I might try a running shop’ you know because I was in the running scene and running a lot…so I just happened to do that. I happened to get this shop front for nothing, glass and all, and then stuck it in here and it fitted just like a treat.

I started the shop in ‘85. We started with a few pairs of shoes and I got contracts because I was a quite established runner, and I’d been sponsored by two or three of the running companies at the time so I had the contacts already. So I just got an account with two or three of the running shoe companies, bought in a few shoes and so on. I had a small budget…I did it all on a shoestring… I worked nights in a restaurant and just put every single penny back in for about three years I suppose (before) I started drawing a salary.

I was just coming to the end of my running career, which finishes at about 40. I was still running at international level but yes, sort of time to start thinking about getting a job or something, you know. I was running marathons all over the world. It was all amateur, but you got a flight to Sri Lanka or wherever…plus hotels plus a few days so you couldn’t complain at all you know. Nice life, you got to odd places that you would never ever go to. Someone phoned up and said can you run in, I don’t know, Zurich or Geneva, anywhere, anywhere really and I’d just say yes.

BARRY WINDHAM is the third generation of shoe repairers in his family. His shop is in George Street.

My dad used to have a shop in Beaconsfield Road – where the old viaduct is – and that’s how he met Jim (Pullinger) because Jim couldn’t do any sewing

Knock on Any Door > Shops & Street Traders

and my dad could. Jim approached my dad and said this shop was in a better position it was more in the middle of Brighton…

I started working here 32 years ago. I left school and I didn’t know what I wanted to do and my dad said: ‘You’re not staying at home doing nothing so while you’re thinking about it you can come into the shop.’ I’m still thinking.

I love it, yeah it’s great. Just the way the shop runs now it’s just very friendly. Customers just come and say hello without bringing anything in, it’s very friendly. It’s a good way to spend the day, meeting different people and just seeing all walks of life really.

We all used to work out the backroom – four people in there, it was a nightmare. We used to have the finisher pushed up against the back wall, where the shoes are on the right-hand side used to be windows all the way down that side as well. Not a lot of space considering we had two bench men in there.

(They) would actually put the work together – knock the soles and the heels, and Jim used to fit the work up. From down in the basement he would see what’s needed, cut the leather and they would come up in the shoe ready to do the job. Then they would prepare the work and pass it on to me and I would finish them, trim them up just to make sure that everything’s done. My dad would do the men’s stuff.

He would stitch them as well so if there was a sole and heel job they would be stitched and that used to be done in the basement as well.

Jim was a gentleman and a stickler for work and timekeeping. If I was – well I don’t think I was late – but he’d be waiting for me to wash the pavements down and wash the windows every day before I started and then you would do a day’s work.Then my dad would say to me about six o’clock: ‘We’ll stay for another couple of hours and I’ll teach you the trade.’ So, long days…I’m going back years and years, the trade was renowned for taking disabled people on. My grandad who was in the trade had one leg shorter than the other. I also used to work with a guy called Duncan Hamilton who was deaf and dumb.

Books Charity Shop St James Street Brighton / 2012 / Chloe Howley Sam Lambourne’s Jog Shop / 2011 / Chloe Howley Pullinger’s Shoe Shop / 2011 / Chloe Howley

> Page 107

No Pilfering Sign, Old Fish Market now The Wood Store 2012 / Chloe Howley No Thieves Sign, Charity Shop St James’s Street / 2011 / Chloe Howley

Knock on Any Door > Shops & Street Traders

Going back years, we used to do a lot of hospital work then but that was pretty tough work ’cause people who owned them shoes would like wear them badly. But yes that was what it was like those years. I suppose on an average Monday you’d be looking to take in between 50-100 pairs of shoes in them days.

We used to do contract work back in them days as well so we used to have a driver going out picking up work from either stores or other shoe repairers that couldn’t do all the work in villages outside of Brighton: Hassocks, Pulborough, Storrington, Findon, Henfield, Billingshurst, quite an area. The van used to go out Mondays and Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays and it would just like rotate, what you collected one week he’d drop back the next week – obviously we don’t do that now. My dad used to do some of the driving when he was taking it easier, although it could be a bit of a nightmare ’cause he used to go out there for hours. He would disappear – more so in the summer when the garden centres were open. He used to go out with Jim Pullinger, but them being out for long it gave us less time to do the work.

Now footwear has changed a lot. Prices have changed a lot, in many ways a throwaway society, cheap imports. People are getting shoes repaired less, although it’s starting to turn around again because people are beginning to change their outlook really, recycling things you know, repairing things so it’s kind of going to go full circle I reckon…

George Street when I arrived I suppose there were different types of people around. I remember the shop having quite a following by the knocker boys, or antique people. They bought good quality footwear so they wanted it repaired. They used to go into the fish restaurant or fish café next door for jellied eels and that kind of thing.

There is a flat above the shop, when I first started there was a couple living up there, Mr and Mrs Perton, and then their son come home to live with them as well. It’s not very big up there but they used to live up there and then they got re-housed by the council. The rent for the flat upstairs brought in £2 a week in the late seventies. I would say it would probably fetch between £600-700 per month (now). That’s quite frightening. I

believe when my dad bought this place I think it cost roundabout £18,000, I believe.

I think there’s me and Jimmy the hairdressers that have probably been in the street the longest now.

JIMMY RICHARDSON has a barber’s on the corner of Edward Street and George Street. He enjoyed art at school so when he was thinking of a career he decided to try hairdressing.

I remember the first day, I thought I can’t stand here all day. When you’re an apprentice you’ve got to stand and you’ve got to clean the mirrors, ‘No that’s still dirty, clean that again’. And the toilets – you clean everything.

I had a hard master, but he was a good master – Harry Mires. He used to go down West Street, and I was there for five years: three years as an apprentice, two years as an improver and then I come up here. I’ve been up here ever since.

Jimmy remembers with affection the staff that worked with him over the years.

We had a mum – we used to call her Young Lady – she worked here for 17/18 years; and before that we had a couple.Then we had a couple of guys here, a friend of mine, his son, he went to school for about six months so we just polished him up and he went off on his own.

(Me and my business partner Bob) we’ve been together 38 years – we’re going to get married next week. Our wives are going to come as well!

Although a relative newcomer, JANE SCHMIDT has become part of the fabric of the neighbourhood, discovering its history through research and by chatting to neighbours. As entertainer Jane BomBane she performs original songs and poetry to the accompaniment of harmoniums and mechanical hats in her licensed café-restaurant. She has also written a musical about 24 George Street.

> Page 109

The house was built somewhere between 1795 and 1805, the land was bought in 1795 for a song and the first person lived here as far as I can see was in 1805. So this street was built in those ten years, this side of the street was anyway…around 1940 it became a Tobacconists shop, Mr and Mrs JH Nicholas, and that was obviously during the war time.

Then around 1950 it became Mr Moreman’s Cycle Shop where he made, mended and adapted bicycles and I think he was quite a character…according to the records, he was one of the first people to sell what was called the power pack, which was like an electric bike, you actually fixed it onto your bike and it turned your bike into an electric bike, I suppose like a little moped.

And he used to go into races, this Mr Moreman, with his power pack and sometimes he’d win.

April, who came here in about 1972, had a little takeaway and all-day breakfast place (Thumbelina’s), and she kept talking about ‘the boys’, and I just said, ‘Who were the boys who used to come in?’ and they were the builders who were building the Amex building, and they kept her going for years. She sat about 30 of them up here serving them egg and bacon.

A lovely Greek character called Andy had the café after Thumbelina’s. For 25 years he ran it as an all-day-breakfast café. He’s a real character, kept having new girlfriends all the time. Lived upstairs again in a bachelor pad.

And then after him was a lovely girl called Alison ran Trogg’s restaurant, it was like a gourmet vegetarian restaurant. I think this street wasn’t ready for it, because it was quite expensive but only because the food was so amazing, it was all organic, lots of edible flowers. But it was only here for about 18 months. And then it was empty for a couple of years, and then we trooped in.

I love this area…It’s a great part of town because it’s so varied. Each little pocket is so different and there are gorgeous little pockets. And then you’ve got all the trade as well, all the pubs and the shops and the seafront.

I’ve met a lot of people that work at Amex.

When I walk up Edward Street, I always think it’s like walking past an art college because you’re seeing all sorts of colourful people going to work at Amex and of

Knock on Any Door > Shops & Street Traders

course I’ve met a lot of those people. Jeremy who works at Amex made this table work, it turns very slowly.

Every table in the café does something different.

There’s the ‘turntable’, the ‘twenty-seven chimes table’, the ‘Aesop’s tables’, the ‘tablerone’, so the puns came first and then we decided what the tables would do…What’s good about these though is because it’s so small and people’s tables do different things, people talk to people, ‘Oh, what does your table do?’ People talk to each other, which is great.

There’s a very strong sense of community in this street…and I think that the local people and certain local groups do a lot to improve the area, I think the law about not drinking outside has cleaned up the streets quite a lot; people aren’t allowed to drink alcohol outside anymore. …quite often at night when I finish I go out just to stretch my legs and I never feel threatened in St James’s Street; it’s always busy, any hour of the night and I always feel safe in this area. I feel very welcome here…I feel that we’ve been accepted by the community.

In 2008 GEORGE WATTS died aged 91, the oldest shop worker in Britain. Born in William Street, his family have been fishmongers since 1790. His son MIKE WATTS still runs the family shop in St James’s Street shop today. When his father died a horse drawn carriage carried the coffin along St James’s Street and hundreds stood in silence to pay their respects.

Jane Bom Banes / George Street Brighton- / jess Huffman and Cathy Cullen

> Page 111

WAR

was calling, ‘There’s a war on now’, apparently it had just come over the radio, Neville Chamberlain.

I remember Mum coming to the door and saying, ‘You’d better not go: there’s a war on’, and the sirens were going but we didn’t know what it was.

MOLLY GRACE was in Queen’s Park when she first heard the siren wail.

WAR “We had our backs against the wall and were bang in trouble.”

It was on a Sunday and it was just a test but we didn’t know and we flew home and all the women were gathering on the streets and I said to my mum, ‘They don’t make a noise when they cry, adults don’t, children make a hell of a noise.’ And it hit me then: all these women with tears running down their cheeks and no sound coming out of their mouths.

Fred Richardson

War was declared on September 3rd 1939.

BERYL TUCKNOTT remembers the day well. She was four years old.

My uncle had taken my dad, my mum and I and my Auntie Pat fishing we were at Slaugham Ponds.

Somebody had a radio and they came over and said ‘We’ve declared war on Germany.’

Everything was slung into this little Morris car – BPO769, I don’t know how I remember that number – and flew home. There wasn’t the traffic about then, down in the basement with our gas masks on… and nothing happened for a year!

JEAN COLLINS was ten in September 1939.

I can remember that morning. We were with our older cousin and we were going up to see my auntie at the top of Pankhurst Avenue. The siren went and Mum

Knock on Any Door > War

With Britain on the brink of defeat in June 1940, thousands of British soldiers were stranded on the beaches of Dunkirk. MIKE WATTS’ grandfather skippered Pop Gun, one of the 16 Brighton fishing boats that sailed across the Channel as part of a desperate rescue mission. Mike recalls the stories he’s been told.

He was one of many that went over with their small boats on the evacuation. It was not many months after when he actually collapsed and died on the fish market hard, down where Brighton Fish Market used to be on Brighton seafront. They put it down to the trauma of what he’d seen. There was a lot of them that went over to bring the fellas back.

MIKE’S grandfather was only 45 when he died. His grandfather’s brother Charlie was also a skipper of one of the Brighton fishing boats that went to Dunkirk and later to St Valery.Years later in an Argus article he said of his brother: ‘I am sure the evacuation killed him.’

Civillan Issue Gas Mask WWII

> Page 115

MOLLY GRACE’S brother was a soldier at Dunkirk.

All the fisher boats went to rescue them and my brother couldn’t swim and he had a heavy pack on his back. He said to this chap, John Whittington, ‘I can’t swim.’

(John) got hold of his hair and dragged him on the boat and saved his life. That man married my sister Win – she met him through my brother – and they had the Running Horse pub (in Grosvenor Street). It’s funny how things turn out.

As France was about to collapse, FRED RICHARDSON narrowly escaped Britain’s worst sea disaster of World War II. I went to France with the Guards in ’39, kicked out in ’40 from St Nazaire, I was very lucky to get out.

The Lancastria was a troop ship. We were on a coal boat and I wouldn’t get on the troop ship, good job I didn’t.

I suppose something like 4,000 to 7,000 were on the Lancastria, and a stuka came over and dropped a bomb straight down the funnel and knocked the bottom out – you’ve never seen nothing like it in all your life.

Churchill hushed it all up because at that time we had our backs against the wall and were bang in trouble, waiting any minute for the Germans to come across, especially here in Brighton. We were ideal here.

Five and twenty minutes up the London Road and they would have been in London, wouldn’t they?

I never saw my wife and daughter for four and a half years. My brother went through the war, got knocked over in Dunkirk, and my other brother, he served right through the war as well. Three of us went through the war together – and we all survived. I was away for five years.

All the young men of RON JEWELL’S family served in the armed forces: not all of them came home.

All nine of us went, four brothers-in-law and five brothers. All the girls were married when the war started but none of the boys were. My brother-in-law Ben was

Knock on Any Door > War

in the navy in the First War, he got sunk in a boat when he was 17 at Jutland (an historic naval battle off the coast of Denmark between the British and German fleets).

They called him up and he served again in the navy. Of course he died, it was age you know.

In 1943 I was in the army, I got a telegram end of March saying BROTHER MISSING OVER GERMANY; Jackie was only married six weeks by the time he got buried in Hanover in Germany. Next day I got another one saying BROTHER MISSING IN THE MIDDLE EAST. That was Georgie; he got wounded at El Alamein. He died and then two days later there was a stray bomb at the bottom of my road and I got another telegram saying BOMB AT CLAREMONT PLACE. And they talk about stress. Take it from me, we had no stress, we got on with life.

I was in the Engineers, building bridges, dirty work. I was stationed all over. We don’t speak about it.

I used to be digging out mines with bayonets. We were lucky towards the end of the war when they got a tank with a flail on it. The flail used to go in front and sort out all the mines, save the blokes doing it…

Not everyone was called up. PATRICIA GEORGE remembers the neighbour who wouldn’t go.

He was a conscientious objector…He said, ‘No, I don’t believe in killing’; he said ‘I’m not doing that’. There was several like that, which you could understand, that they didn’t believe in killing people. He didn’t worry about it, (what people said). He said, ‘You can say what you like to me but I’m still not going to war.’

His wife was quite pleased; she didn’t want him to go either. She said, ‘Why should he? You hear about these people getting killed and all that’. I said, ‘I know, that’s the sad part about it’. They were about 21. It was unusual for a young man…

I had a cousin in ’39 his boat was the first boat to go down and he got killed and left his wife and three sons. It was so sad, it had only been started about a month and that happened. My brother was sent to India.

We were glad he was there because they didn’t have to

fight like they did all around… it was sort of more like a holiday, they used to play cricket. He was the only one in our family that got called up – I wasn’t. I was 17 then, but my mother said, ‘No, you’re not going’, because I wanted to go in the Wrens but she said, ‘No, I won’t sign no paper, you’re not old enough.’

The war affected everyone, sometimes in unexpected ways. EILEEN JONES remembers the Girl Guides preparing for conflict just before war was declared. It was all a bit of a let down.

There was a big railway station in Kemp Town, our captain took us there and it was a big Air Raid Precaution exercise and we had labels put round our necks and I can remember laying by a railway train in that station, a casualty, we were dummy casualties. We were there ages and ages and ages and nobody ever picked us up and we never even got a cup of tea or anything, and it finished and we came away with the captain, and it was the most disappointing thing.

PATRICK GEORGE had good reason to remember the period just before he was called up.

Once you became 18 you had to go into the services. Before that, I was in the Life Boys, then I went into the Boys’ Brigade – they did give very good training in lots of things, especially first aid, they gave you a hard course in first aid. Before I got my call up papers, I had to register with the ARP at Circus Street School. All the chaps who worked during the day had to do two nights a week; it was for air raid precautions mainly, and I went down to Circus Street and when I went in there and gave them my paper, he says ‘Come with me’. When I went into this other room there were two bunks, in the other rooms there were loads, so he said, ‘Well, you’re special duty’ And it turns out it was because I had these certificates for first aid.

The very first night there was air raid precautions, the bell went, it was a false alarm, and they all come back.

Eileen Jones Land Girl Aged 17 Ron Jewell and Brothers Anti Gas Training Certificate Patrick George

> Page 117

Just as they all settled down the chap said to me ‘Quick, quick – there’s a car waiting for you – be quick!’ So I ran out the back and saw this old girl sat there and we went off. We finished up where Elm Grove School is, one of the houses there – she was a midwife! I didn’t realise until we went in the room, and she said, ‘Right, you do exactly what I say. Don’t do nothing different, but exactly what I say.’

She had twins I think, the girl in there.

Anyway, the funniest thing was when we come out and she said to me, ‘You did very well, I hope I get you all the time’.

Her name was Nurse Ryman, and of all people, she’s the one who brought me into the world – now there’s a coincidence.

Her grandmother, however, wasn’t satisfied until she found a better air raid shelter. All the residents of St Dunstan’s (the home for visually impaired ex servicemen and women) had been evacuated and their Kemp Town site, West House (now Pearson House), was also empty.

She obtained permission to use the chairman’s personal air raid shelter. Rene remembers it as being lovely…

RENE WOOLGAR’S grandmother rang the town hall for advice on the safest place to take shelter in the family home, the Mason’s Arms in Seymour Street, Kemp Town and was told ‘under the stairs’. However, on the first night they heard the air raid siren a shower of biscuit and crisp tins hit her when she opened the door. She decided that the family would be better off under Kemp Town brewery also in Seymour Street.

Rene remembers how uncomfortable it was.

We never went to the greengrocer, only for fruit…in the war time he grew his own tobacco plants.

He would put these tobacco plants on his bike and bring them down and shred them all up and dry them off.

I’d rather have stayed in bed if you know what I mean – we go down all these wooden steps, miles and miles. The NFS (National Fire Service) were there, they used to play cards waiting…We went down every night to this blimming shelter, and it was cold.

My cousin Charlie comes in one day…he was a pilot and says, ‘I often say hello to you when I’m passing.

We see the Kemp Town Brewery chimney and we know where we are.’ And that’s the place we’re underneath for bombings, with the big barrels of beer and the big vats.

We’d have been drowned!

Anyway, my mum says to my grandmother, ‘If we’re going to go we go together, no more air raid shelters.’ So we had our own beds in the pub.

…It had a teapot and a kettle and switches. My gran was in her glory there, wasn’t she? She was happy, we were happy…

EILEEN JONES’ father won prizes for his vegetables in peace time. When war was declared he turned to more exotic produce.

He was resourceful in other ways.

He used to always mend our shoes, but when things were so scarce, I can remember on my shoes he got hold of old bike tyres and cut out the rubber and put them on his shoes.

BERYL TUCKNOTT started at Richmond Street School the year the war started.

The youngest children had to have a nap every afternoon in the hall on small camp beds. I didn’t like this at all, but when we’d had bombing raids and dog fights overhead during the night, I expect it was good to get a bit of sleep. When there was a raid during the day we were sat in the corridor with arms and legs crossed and led in singing songs at the top of our voices; this was to shut out the noise of the bombs dropping and the dog fights overhead.

Our shelter was situated beneath the far end of the playground; we would have to cross the tarmac to Bombing Map / Brighton and Hove Museum / Re- printed from the Brighton and Hove Herald October 7th 1944 >

Knock on Any Door > War

BOMBING MAP

reach it in full view of the enemy planes who opened fire on anything that moved – that’s why we were kept inside.

When the bomb dropped and Bessie (our childminder) was still with us, she was alone in the house one day. I was at school, Mum and Dad were at the shop when a customer said Ashton Street had ‘copped it’ and Dad got on his bike – one of those big trade bikes – and rode home. There was dust, glass and rubble everywhere; he couldn’t find Bessie at first, she wasn’t in the basement – which is where she should have been – and he eventually found her cowering like a scared rabbit in the kitchen on top of the built-in bath behind a curtain in amongst the pots and pans. She’d been too frightened to go down to the cellar alone, afraid of being buried alive.

(My mother had) distempered my little sliproom and she put these circles of little Disney characters round the middle and when another bomb dropped, Jackie and I came out of Richmond Street School and the air-raid wardens had a big rope, like a hawser, across the bottom of Ashton Street.

I can see us in my imagination – these two little girls crossing the road holding hands, all the glass and rubble in the road, and the warden said, ‘What do you want?’

And I said, being the older, ‘I want to go home.’

And he lifted this rope up and let us go under, and I got to the front door – we had no windows – and my dad saw me and he came out and, of course, I burst into tears. He picked me up and he said ‘It’s all right, your pictures are still there’, and he carried me up the stairs to my room which was like primrose-yellow and all these Disney pictures were still there and I shut up then. He hit on the right thing to say.

The other children, especially those in London, they came home and their house was down…

Dad was eventually called up.The girl who helped my dad in the shop, my dad and Bessie – who looked after me – were all called up on the same day – so poor old Mum was left with me, the shop and the house.

Bessie went in the NAAFI, dad went in the Royal Ordnance Corps, and I don’t know what happened to

Knock on Any Door > War

the girl but she carried on, she kept it going all through the war and beyond right into the 50s.

There was a basement which during the war was shored up. It was our air raid shelter and there was an iron bedstead – no mattress on it – just blankets, and if we had any air raid we used to have to go down there. I do remember going down there sometimes, but I remember waking up at night with the dogfights going on – there was the basement, the ground floor and then the top floor – and seeing mum – she used to let me sleep with her or take me in with her when there was a raid. She’d be sitting on the edge of the bed with her slacks and her jumper on over her pyjamas. And I said to her once, ‘Why didn’t we go down to the basement?’ and she said, ‘I was ready to grab you if a bomb had dropped.’

You know the women all had to help and she used to have to do fire-watching. And of course on a hill and in a tall house, she used to sit in the window watching.

Mum used to get up very early, go down to Circus Street to the municipal market to order her stock, over to Sydney Street to open the shop, wait for the assistant to take over, then went back to the house to get me up and ready for school, then back to the shop for the day. She kept this going all through the war and beyond; and an elderly aunt and my mum’s brother-inlaw used to look after me when Bessie was called up. I must have been one of the original ‘latch-key kids’ in the end. I used to put the wireless on very loud when I got in from school, when I got older: I didn’t like the silence in that big house.

In JEAN COLLINS’ house there was a table shelter called a Morrison Shelter. Anderson Shelters were erected in the garden. Morrison Shelters were intended for indoor use and over half a million were distributed in kit form by the end of 1941. They were free for most people – only those households with an income of more than £350 per year had to pay.

Bomb shelter St Johns School / Brighton and Hove Museum

> Page 121

They had the metal tops, and we used to sleep under that. You had your mattresses and your bedding and all that under there. Mrs Beard who lived two doors away slept in our house, because she was a widow and her daughter was away in the forces, and her son had died at the beginning of the war.

It was quite fun really. You’re young kids and you just accepted it, you didn’t realise how serious it was, the war, until you saw the plane coming overhead and saw the bombs dropping.

JOAN MOORHOUSE’S mother had a theory about staying safe from bombs Well you know it was quite frightening during the war. We didn’t have an air raid shelter and we never went to the air raid shelter down the end of the street.

My mother said when she looked at bombed houses the stairs were nearly always standing so we used to sit on the bottom step, my mother and my sister and me.

MOLLY GRACE was an excited six-year-old when the war started.

I don’t think we ever feared it – the only time we did was when Grosvenor Street was bombed, it was just up above where we lived, and my mum said a few expletives, as you would, about the Germans. She used to go out and shake her hand to the sky – I thought, they can’t see you doing that Mum. She used to go, ‘Oh, you rotten lot, go back to your own country!’ As if they could hear, you know, it was so funny.

When Grosvenor Street was bombed there was a baby found by the gas stove dead and the mother still holding onto it.

It was bombed twice. My mum said, ‘The Zylo Works are still there’, which is still up there (at the top of Albion Hill). They thought that was a munitions factory and they were trying to bomb it, but it fell on Grosvenor Street.

I remember seeing them digging that baby out; my mother said, ‘No, you’ve got to go home Molly, you ID card donated by Sue Solly

Knock on Any Door > War

mustn’t watch this’, but I was fascinated. All children are. And I remember this dog sitting in this van with the window down and I went to stroke it and it bit me straight in the nose. I had to go to hospital. I didn’t go to school for a week because my nose was all funny. He was guarding the food I think, this dog.

I had a brother called Victor, and he used to run up to his bedroom and watch these planes coming over, and my mother would say, ‘Victor, get down here, you’ll get shot!’

The government supplied everybody with black cloths, like curtains to pull, and you mustn’t show a chink of light. But when it was moonlit night, my mum used to say, ‘Jerry‘ll be over tonight because the moon’s shining: they can see what they’re up to.’

We all had to sit in the electricity cupboard when there was a bombing raid, because my mother said, and quite rightly so, I could see her point, that if you walked along the street where the houses had been bombed, the only thing you saw standing was the staircase. It never seemed to get blown up, the staircases were all there, and people used to hide in the electricity cupboards under the stairs, and we felt safe there.

Victor passed wind in the cupboard, my mother said, ‘If they don’t shoot us, we’ll all be gassed’, and we laughed so much we had to come out of the cupboard.

It was so funny.

After this cupboard business, my Mother said ‘I’ve got too many children squeezed in the cupboard and Victor keeps passing wind’, and we couldn’t keep a straight face… So they let us have a huge shelter that was heavy metal and like a big dining table, and it sort of occupied the whole of the room and it had sort of little air-vents in it, and we used to sleep (under there).

The full name of the Zylo Works was the London Nameplate Company. During wartime it manufactured name plates for aircraft and tanks.

Born in 1940, MALCOLM KEEPING grew up with the war and remembers his grandfather’s determination to protect his family in his own way.

My early recollections are the Anderson Shelter in the garden and the sirens going off and rushing out into the garden at night and going down these wooden steps into the shelter under the ground. The shelter was made of corrugated steel sheets which went over in a sort of an arch with straight bits each end. Of course it was very damp and I can remember it used to sweat with the water dripping down all the sides. Where they’d dug all the chalk out, they piled that up on the top of it so our garden went up in a bump almost level with the tops of the garden walls. And those shelters stayed there until the mid-40s, before they got dismantled.

My grandparents, my father’s parents, lived at 77 Albion Hill and that was almost my second home. They had a shelter built in their kitchen. It was quite common and it took the place of the kitchen table; and it was made of thick steel and steel plate – perhaps about a quarter of an inch thick on the top, so it was really heavy; most probably the whole lot weighed about a tonne or more; and it had wire mesh down the sides and big thick steel legs on it. It was built strong enough that if the house collapsed it wouldn’t squash. They had the beds underneath it My grandfather wouldn’t go in there, he would stand at the bottom of the stairs, to attention, during the air raid with a bucket of water beside him and a brass syringe – used for watering the plants. He’d stand there with that by the side of him. If a fire broke out he’d spray water over it.

RENE ANSELL was a teenager when she and her mother moved to Richmond Place during the war because their home in Southampton had been bombed.

In a 2007 interview with the Argus newspaper she reminisced about her father, Jack Marks. A high-profile booking agent, he looked after glamorous film stars when they came over to Britain from America. Rene met many of her father’s clients including Fred Astaire, Errol Flynn, Cary Grant and Bob Hope.

My father stayed a lot in Southampton, he had to stay in his office even though the windows were all

> Page 123

blown out. My mother and her sister got on alright, they had their arguments here and there, but we had nowhere else to go, so we had to stay there till we got somewhere else. It was near the dance hall, so that was fine, I just ran across the green to the Dome and that was it.

(I remember) watching the German bombers going over at six o’ clock every night; we all went down to the crypt in St Peter’s Church with our knitting and our sandwiches and whatever, and played cards every night. We made a lot of friends under there, talking, laughing, playing cards… Mind you, it was a stupid place, because they bombed churches but they didn’t really bomb that one…Loads of people would be there, all the people along Richmond Place, playing cards and my aunt played cards and my mother played cards – whist.

SHIRLEY TIDEY attended Richmond Street School during the war.

My mother came running down the hill to get me because she thought the school (had been) bombed. (It hadn’t.) It was just Ebenezer Chapel and Apollo Terrace and Sussex Terrace. And I remember plain as anything, there was a funeral down there on that day and they just got out the house before (their) part of the street was bombed.

BERYL TUCKNOTT describes the shelter built at Finsbury Road School.

At the back of the school there was no entrance then – but that’s where the classrooms were – so what they did, they knocked a hole in the classroom wall and then there was a great dip, so they built like a bridge across to the wall, another hole in that wall with a door.

So, you’d come out of the classroom across this bridge, through this other wall and into the air raid shelter. Each class had its shelter and you just had to sit there. And for years you’d be able to see – if you went along Finsbury Road – you could see where they’d bricked in the door;

Knock on Any Door > War

the class teacher would have the keys to open, as soon as the air raid warnings went, she’d unlock the door and you’d go through.

When St Luke’s School was damaged by bombing – I don’t think it was actually bombed but it had damage – we had to share with that. It was a bigger school than Finsbury Road, so they would go one week mornings, and the next week afternoons, and we’d go vice versa. So we only went to school half days.

During one raid our street had a direct hit on the butcher’s shop; he was killed. The houses lost their top windows, shot out by the plane. And we had a big hole in our passage wall caused by the blast. My mum’s front room, her pride and joy, covered in dust and rubble.

Mum had cousins in St Anne’s, Lancashire, who offered to have me as an evacuee. They were a lovely couple who used to visit us most summers, so I knew them.

They had no children. But Mum decided to keep me with her.

PATRICIA GEORGE remembers the blackout.

One of my friends, she lived right up Moulsecoomb, so when we went out she’d come and stay with me, because you couldn’t walk in the dark right through the streets…it was pitch black. The only time we liked was when the moon was out and you could see where you was going… but until then you’d go out and you’d feel against the wall as you walked along because it was pitch dark and you daren’t throw a light through the windows because you’d have someone coming on and saying ‘Put that light out!’

The wardens used to go round…they had to keep going up and down the streets to make sure there was no lights on and if the air raids went they’d got to take you down into the air raid shelter. But we was lucky, we never had to do that, we used to hide under the table when the sirens went.

MOLLY GRACE was a very young and very scared child when the family went hop picking during the war. The Battle of Britain was being fought above their heads.

Home of Interviewee Albion Hill 2011 / Chloe Howley

> Page 125

The farmer dug a big ditch right around the field and this is what he said to my mother, ‘Mrs Hayman, if it gets too bad, get in the ditch.’

‘You’re bloody mad!’ she said. ‘If the Germans don’t kill us, Molly will drown us!’ because every time I got in the ditch I’d wet myself with fright. Anyway, we came home, and that provided us with shoes for the winter, that’s why my mother went hop-picking. But no school ever argued then: they knew about people’s plight, how poor they were, because you couldn’t take a month off and go picking in this day and age, they wouldn’t allow it would they, really? the home front

by Tony Spiers we shall fill our bellies with nettles we shall delight in dried egg and carrot pudding we shall turf out the football grass for a game of spuds and spinach we shall farm pie rabbits and egg hens we shall pluck rose hips from the hedges for sweet syrups we shall paint nylons on our legs we shall wear soot for eye shadow we shall cobble swagger coats from old blankets we shall melt down our train sets for spitfires we shall gorge on the wireless we shall be vast ragged choirs we shall sing white cliffs of Dover we shall dangle our legs over the abyss we shall foxtrot with strangers we shall suck the marrow from each moment we shall overflow with life EILEEN JONES first worked at the Standard Tablet Company in Hove, making aspirins and other kinds of medicinal tablets. She then joined the Land Army.

Eggs MIke Watts’ Fishmongers / St James’s St 2011 / Chloe Howley

Knock on Any Door > War

By 1943 about 80,000 young women were working in every aspect of agriculture – it was hard physical work, vital to the war effort. Their uniform consisted of green ties and jumpers and brown felt slouch hats.

We worked for the War Agricultural Committee and we used to report every morning in Patcham Village…at least once in about every four weeks we had to do a fire-watching stretch and that was keeping awake all night having worked all day on the farm…one night the newsagent opposite came to us girls and said ‘Such and such a time there was a raid, put it in your book...’

We were so tired we couldn’t have heard anything, and we were fire-watching… So you can imagine how tired we were, couldn’t keep yourself awake after slaving in the fields all day. He got us out of a big hole that fellow; yes, everybody helped each other, there was good spirits.

At certain times during the war Brighton was a banned area – no day trippers or holidaymakers were allowed in and that meant residents had to carry identity cards at all times. One summer Eileen managed to get back to Brighton without her card. … We’d been harvesting, and some soldiers took us in their van, and I can remember sitting on these ammunition boxes to get back into Brighton… otherwise, if you’d been caught, you had to go present yourself to the police station with your identity card to get back into Brighton… because of traitors…

Eileen found that wartime was an era of equality and small kindnesses…

It was equal in the war, because everybody had a ration book, whether you were rich or poor, you couldn’t exceed over that, and it was enough to keep you. I can always say when I worked on the land, I was always hungry, and the only extra food we got was a quarter of a pound of cheese extra (a week) because we were farm labourers.

I can remember in a field in Eastbourne…awful billet, food was short…and I was so, so hungry and we were up in the fields, we’d been walking miles and one of

the girls gave me a sandwich of jam and cheese in it and it was manna from the gods; and today I make a cheese sandwich with jam and I think back, ‘Oh Hilda, thank you so much.’

By day RENE ANSELL was a civil servant for the Admiralty doing hush-hush work in offices at Allen West Engineering Company in Moulsecoomb. By night she danced and sang.

We worked on radio location for five years during the war. I knew where all the ships were during the war, all the battleships – it was a secret place – and we had to supply all the valves and everything that went on the ships… it was very interesting. There was about three other people there, and a laboratory. Everyone was friendly and nice.

I was singing every night in the band on the seafront at the Norfolk Hotel – I think it’s the Ramada now. We had an officers’ club on Sunday – that’s what I did most of the nights. The other nights I was dancing.

There was a lady who had a lot of evening dresses and she gave me several which I had to have altered a little bit… actually, they were a little bit old for me, but I managed with them because I didn’t have anything else.They were fine. When we got bombed and I threw them out of the window, I thought what am I going to wear tonight? And I picked up one and never thought anything about it and when I got to the hotel, of course it was covered in dust, I was covered in dust. I had to shake myself off before I could perform.

Many famous people used to go to the hotel here like Vera Lynn and all that lot because they came away from London at the weekend.They knew the band leader because he used to be at the Ritz, and they came down for the weekend to get away from the bombs, so we had lots of famous people come here. And she did what I did: sang to the troops.

I loved it at the hotel; the officers’ club was smashing, you can imagine. All about it, I loved it, every bit of it. It was a happy period.

> Page 127

On the seafront it was barricades, and it was a curfew. I went from the Norfolk Hotel to Sherry’s – which was the Pink Coconut years ago – they couldn’t have it open after a certain time because there was a curfew round there. They didn’t do dancing like they do now, there was no acrobats, they danced properly – you go dancing now, they’re throwing people over their shoulders all the time. At Sherry’s they had the World Dancing Championships and the dancing was exquisite.

It was smooth and beautiful … Oh I liked dancing then…

We went dancing and we walked the streets, wherever you went you weren’t petrified that someone was following you; and there were no Englishmen here.

They were all Canadians, Australians, Americans and New Zealand. But you didn’t look behind you to see who was following you. There was no problems; you walked up North Street and North Road with thousands of soldiers, nobody touched you, even late at night.

I never learnt (to sing). I sang when I was 14 in a big band in Southampton, a very famous American band, and then I went on to sing with a local band, and then when I come down here I sang till I got married. And then I didn’t sing when I got married, he wouldn’t let me; but now I do more than I’ve ever done in my life, three or four times a week.

PATRICK GEORGE recalls the war years when the Dome was a dance hall and American and Canadian troops were stationed in Brighton.

It was beautiful. All it consisted of was the big stage and seats all the way round each side, but as you got out to the other side that opened out into the Corn Exchange – the bar.

I got myself a job behind the bar before I went into the navy. I was too young to serve beer and I went first off collecting all the glasses and behind the bar (there was) anything up to five or six barmaids.

Terrific bands.You couldn’t really dance, it was so crammed, really packed it was.

Knock on Any Door > War

RENE ANSELL went on to marry and have a family of her own, running Remnants fabric shop in Blatchington Road, Hove, but she looks back at the war years with some regrets.

All I was interested in was the music, and the dancing, I danced before I sang. I taught dancing to some of the soldiers. As long as I had music I was fine.

(There was) a Canadian soldier, one particular one. He was exceptional. They used to stand and watch him dance at the Regent – he was good looking, he was the image of Gene Kelly, and danced and sang like him; absolutely incredible. We danced together and we were great friends for two years because he wanted to marry me...He wanted to go to Canada – well I was an only child and my father would have been devastated, I just thought about that instead of thinking about myself. But he did marry and he kept in touch with me for a long while, he couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to marry him.

I went to Canada later on in life – my son lives there – and we managed to find his phone number after many, many years. He was still alive then and when we spoke on the phone he knew instantly who it was, directly I spoke, and he wrote me a couple of letters and he said that he had a happy marriage and he had four children like I did, but there had only ever been one love in his life and it had been me.

I don’t know why I did what I did. I was even in his pay book when he got injured – in the army they notify you if people get injured or something like that.

Yes, it’s a very sad thing. In fact, I’ve still got some of his letters dated 1944… some nice memories.

MOLLY GRACE remembers being evacuated to Yorkshire as a child.

It got so bad, the bombing, my mother said ‘the two people that can’t work because they’re too small, too young, they can be evacuated’ – because all the others worked and there was no one to watch us all day, do you see? I went to Carlton Hill School and my mother took us to the station.

We were waving a bit and so excited and then when the train started moving we started bawling our eyes out. We were sitting there with a big fat boy and they gave soup on the train and a sandwich and he kept looking at us, he said ‘You don’t want the soup then, or the sandwich?’ and he scoffed the lot, and we had nothing because we were crying. We didn’t care what he’d done, we just sat there.

Anyway, we were taken up to York to a hospital for the night, and we were only little children and we were so tired, but (there were) lovely food spreads… but we couldn’t eat it we were so tired. The nurses, they took all the clothes off us except for little ‘vesty’ things – well my Iris, she was three years older than me, and I could see the nurse holding her up, carrying her to the toilet, and her bum sticking out, you know, and everybody started giggling; so I thought, if I even wet the bed, I’m not going out to go for a wee because they’re all looking at you.

We couldn’t write home to say we weren’t happy because the woman used to buy the stamp but read the letter first, so we had nothing to say. I was too young to write letters anyway: my sister Iris used to be Iris in the cellar if she was naughty. My mother used to say ‘I would have strangled her if I’d have known.’

My mother got up to Yorkshire from Brighton – she went hop-picking and saved the money from there that year to come up and see us – we’d been there three years.

Well I ran in – normally if you see your mum walking down the road, you run to your mother – but I ran in and said ‘Oh, my mum’s coming’ ‘Oh, your mother doesn’t want you’, that sort of thing (was said).

Anyway, she stayed overnight and we went back the next day to Brighton.

A united community faced the dangers of war. BETTY FIELD remembers that children were told what they should do if they were in the street when the air raid warning sounded and they couldn’t run home or to the safety of a shelter.

Knock on any door. Or just see if you could open the door and walk in. It was accepted that you could do that.

Although RON BURTENSHAW was a small child during the war, he can’t forget the day Hitler tried to blow him up.

I do remember one incident when my mother took us to Carlton Hill post office to collect my father’s wages from the War Office (he was fighting in North Africa about this time) A friendly woman from Devonshire Place invited my mother around to her house for a cup of tea and a chat; her husband was due on leave from the navy. Before my mother could say yes to the invite, the sirens sounded and she ran to my grandfather’s house in Lennox Street for shelter. I do not remember the explosion but only the fear around me and the Anti Aircraft guns going off from the roof of the Zylo Works opposite.

I was only three years old, but the noise and fear are imprinted in my memory. My mother filled me in on the detail later; the woman she spoke to was killed outright when the bomb fell on her house. My pram was left outside and it was covered in bricks and great lumps of chalk. I would have been killed if I had stayed outside. To my mother this was the last straw and we were evacuated to Southwater, to the relative safety of the countryside near Horsham.

In these dreadful days, if a house became empty for any length of time, it was requisitioned by the authorities and another homeless family would be moved in. The neighbours knew of my mother’s plight and rallied round to ensure the house had a lived-in look.

My mother would return fairly often to visit the shops and post office so that her absence was not noticed.

Curtains were pulled, the cat fed, lights were turned on before the blackout etc. We all returned to Windmill Street in late 1944, just as if we had not been away.

> Page 129

JOHN STEVENS also had more than one lucky escape.

I did get caught in an air raid once: I’d had an aunt that was living in Albion Hill and I’d been down there and I was going home and I wasn’t very old and as I came along Liverpool Street, the sirens went off and the planes came flying in and as I run up Richmond Street all the windows of the houses of the other side of the road shattered. When I got indoors they said I was covered in dust and dirt and all the dust had come up from the bomb…it was midday, just after midday, a lot of them came flying in...whether it was our spitfires chasing them (the bombers) that tried to shoot me up I don’t know but all the windows went out on the other side of the road, that was a scary thing.

We were in school there when they bombed Ashford Street: we had a shelter down in the playground, we used to have to go down in the shelter. I remember the bombs falling. The sirens used to go and they took us down into the shelters and they used to sometimes give a piece of toast or you were always ill, or you’d be singing or something, repeating nursery rhymes and different things to keep your mind going.

Towards the end of the war BERYL TUCKNOTT was sitting on the top of a bus when she saw a doodlebug.

We were fearful: it was a rocket with flames coming out of the back and we knew that if the engine stopped it dropped. It was just chug-chug-chug-chug. I still see it now. God knows what happened to the people who copped the end of it.

Brighton was badly bombed, people don’t realise, because the bombers would come over and if the RAF fought them away, they weren’t allowed to take the bombs back, and we were the last biggest town then between London and the Channel, and also having those big gasometers at Black Rock, that’s what they aimed for.

Although JOHN STEVENS was young, he knew what to do when doodlebugs went silent. He was also an experienced observer of the deadly aerial battles

Knock on Any Door > War

fought above his head as German and British fighter pilots struggled to outmanoeuvre one another.

Oh you was safe all the time you could hear them… they were flying bombs and…when they stopped, when you couldn’t hear them, you’d dive for cover because it meant they were going down. We used to see the dogfights over our heads, the planes and everything. Aunt Bess, who lived right over the road, her roof got machine-gunned in a dogfight, we were watching a dogfight and the bullets went all round her chimney.

We had a cockpit of the one of the planes came down in the street and we made wings with perspex and little crosses and everything. And if you really wanted to be naughty you burnt it because you got a terrible smell.

Air Raid on Tarner

by Derek Jones The darkness enclosed us, wrapped us in gloom.

We sat and endured, knowing some met their doom.

We all felt the fear that gripped us so tight And prayed, every one, that we’d last through the night.

The distant bombs crumped like fire balls and thunder While the closer ones’ crunch told of homes split asunder.

In a dire speechless state, not of our choosing, Our terror prevailed like a wound gently oozing.

When RENE ANSELL’S home was bombed it made the pages of the local newspaper, the Evening Argus.

There was an animal clinic on the corner of Grand Parade, and our furnished flat was at the back.

We’d had a parrot for many, many years and this parrot loved noise and he used to pace up and down his perch and he used to like me singing, every time I sang this parrot sang with me. The louder I sang, this parrot sang.

From the James Gray Collection, the photographic archive of the Regency Society.

When we got bombed my mother was lucky, she was out somewhere. They phoned where I was working in Moulsecoomb, all I was worried about was, was the parrot alive? I was worried more about the parrot than the clothes – you didn’t have much – and our furniture, it was furnished you see. So when I got there, it was all cordoned off, lots of people and the firemen and goodness knows what.

‘You can’t go up there.’

‘But I’ve got to go in there, my parrot’s in there.’

‘You go up at your own risk up the stairs…’

So I went up there and I threw clothes out the window – also I had a box under the bed with Christmas money from where I was working, I managed to get that and the parrot.

The whole cage was filled with debris, but the parrot was alive and carrying on something terrible, because of the noise, and it was pacing up and down – all you could see was its beady eyes. So I brought it down the stairs and of course everyone cheered and laughed, but they didn’t laugh when the parrot came out with the most terrible language you could ever wish for.

It was in the Argus: ‘POLLY HATES THE GERMANS’ It must have heard it coming over on the boat – the seamen – because my father didn’t know what swearing was. People must have thought what house did I live in? Every word you could think of it came out with – foul language. And of course, that made everybody laugh.

EILEEN JONES is still in touch with a friend who was caught up in an air raid.

Phyllis, she was a child at the end of the road, her father owned the bakery, and she’d…been alone in Queen’s Park with her dolls pram, and she must have been on her way home, coming down Egremont Place, and the bomb dropped in Kemp Town.

Dockerill’s massive great plate of glass window shattered…she was thrown in the air having got the blast... Fortunately enough there was a policeman nearby

Knock on Any Door > War

who wasn’t affected, picked her out, wrapped her in his cloak and being in Eastern Road she was quickly taken to the hospital and she survived and when she came home I was in the private quarters of the bakery and her mother showed me her body and you could have put fingers in her wound, truly.

Her mother kept all the glass pieces, all the clothes that she wore, in a box…I met Phyllis a few years’ back, she then was a grandmother and she told me that a few days before she’d gone into the hospital and another piece of plate glass window had come out from an old wound…

DENNIS SMITH remembers the lucky escape he and his teenage friends had when bombs fell on Blaker Street and White Street.

We had the house smashed up two or three times. We were lucky when the bombing first started up.

On the corner between White Street and Blaker Street, there was a sweet shop and tobacconist and there were about four or six of us and we went round there to get some cigarettes. We walked to the top of Blaker Street chatting when Jerry came over and dropped a thousand pounder. We never heard a bang we were so close. The shop was gone and we couldn’t get back down the street. It was one mass of dust, so we went round as far as Devonshire Street before we could get back – three roads round before we came back – and of course we thought our house had gone. But fortunately it was damaged but we were ok. It was a terrible sight to see it.

There was one young girl lived in White Street there, just had this baby, I knew her well, and she got killed and the baby vanished. Years after they were redoing a roof and in the dust they found this baby’s skeleton.They think the baby was in the bath (and it) was blown over into the roof.

That day 20 500lb bombs fell on the borders of Tarner – from Edward Street to Upper Rock Gardens – killing approximately a quarter of all the people who were to die in bombing raids in Brighton during the war.

And then the last time (there was a bombing raid) I was actually doing the wallpaper on the Saturday and I thought hello what’s that and I went out and actually saw the bombs coming down and it was the one that killed all the kiddies in the cinema.The wallpaper shop was on the corner of Egremont Place. The cinema was just further up, St George’s Road, and the girl a couple of doors from us, one of the youngsters, she got killed in that. …our doctor, his son got killed in that. His son was at Brighton College, he was only 13 or 14, and his father died after, I’m sure he died of a broken heart.

The Odeon cinema in St George’s Road, Kemp Town – where Cavendish Court now stands – took a direct hit killing eight children and two adults on September 14th 1940. There were 300 in the cinema at the time.

PATRICIA GEORGE was one of them.

I was in there with a friend when that bomb come down and we just sat there petrified and they said to the people, ‘Just sit still, don’t move.’ We had to sit there and wait until they’d cleared the rubble… the whole lot had come in on the seats and everything…

You forget so much what happened…I had three friends that were killed in the air raid and you think of the young lives taken like that.

On the morning of 29th March 1943 a bomb tore through the Circus Street fruit and vegetable market and ended up in the clinic on the corner of Morley Street and Ivory Place. Nineteen people died, including pregnant women and small children. BETTY FIELD was there.

I’m sure it was a Monday morning, a normal school day. I’d had a niggling toothache over the weekend.

My mother put oil of cloves on it but by the time I got to school it was a throbbing feeling.

Fred Richardson / In Cairo 1942 Photo Donated by Sue Solly

> Page 133

Patrick George (far left of front row) ‘taken in America’ aged 21 Torpedo Record Sheet / Patrick George

Knock on Any Door > War

Betty’s teacher at St Mary’s School in Mount Street asked if she wanted to go home to her mother or to the dentist at the school clinic. Betty decided to go to the clinic.

I walked into the clinic just as the pips went, the warning signal, and this lady – a nurse of some sort – rushed down the stairs and said, quickly this way, and she pulled me into a concrete building. I’m not sure if it was a shelter within the clinic or a separate building.

And a man who’d been walking along the street with a barrow – I think he was a fruit and vegetable man – and an elderly lady came in with us. It was just us sitting in the shelter.

It was like someone had sucked in a big breath and then there was a rumble and we heard a lot of masonry falling. The next thing I remember it was very dark and dusty and someone called, “It’s ok. We’ll come and get you. We’ve got to dig you out. “ I could hear shovels going and I think they were pulling smaller bits away with their hands. It took some time to get us. I just sat there with this lady and I just felt safe. She put her arms about me and she seemed motherly. (Now) I know that the bomb they dropped bounced all along the street and then went in the door of the clinic and if I’d been a few seconds later I’d have been walking along that street with a bomb bouncing behind me. When we came out there were a lot of people, first aid people, ARP people and they said are you all right and I just said, ‘I’ve still got toothache’.

At the time Betty didn’t realise how many had been killed.

But I had noticed when I went in the clinic that there were children playing in the foyer and I thought it must have been maternity day because there were pregnant women sitting there as well.

An ARP warden walked me home up Sussex Street and through Queen’s Park to my mother. She said are you all right and I said, yes and she said that’s good and that was it. I was just grateful I was alive. My mother

brought me up like that. ‘Don’t borrow trouble’, that was one of her quotes.

EILEEN JONES was an eye witness to the Morley Street air raid.

I was ill in bed, I must have been about 12 I think, and I actually saw a German plane go across because we were high up and I saw the pilot with the leather helmet on in an open cockpit.

PATRICIA GEORGE’S home at 35 Claremont Street was bombed on the same day as her work place – Channel Laundry – was hit.

My brother was on leave then, it was his last days (before) going abroad, if he’d been at home he’d have got killed, so we were thankful no-one was indoors… and then we had the bombing where I worked at the Channel Laundry. One of the girls – Theresa her name was – she was from head to toe covered in glass.

We got to the bottom of the hill, we could see all the clinic and all that was bombed, and the policeman… let you in because we lived in there, so we went up and we saw these people all injured, it was a horrible experience to see it.

You used to have to make your own entertainment because there was so much sorrow going on, when you see the people and you see your friend being killed and that.

EILEEN JONES will never forget when a bomb dropped on Hannington’s department store in North Street.

I don’t know how it didn’t hit the Pavilion – I was in the cellar in the flat (at the Public Assistance Office in Steine Gardens) and it shook and it felt like a pack of cards and any moment I thought the whole lot’s going to come in on top of us, and I was so terrified I was screaming.

> Page 135

When I was taken upstairs to the flat I was given brandy and I thought, ‘Now they’re even trying to kill me.’

That was what went through my mind…I hate drink. I thought, ‘Oh, dear me, it’s worse than medicine.’

BETTY FIELD remembers being very afraid of solitary planes. They didn’t drop bombs, instead the pilot had a machine gun and on one particular day it felt as though his aim was very personal indeed.

I should think that everyone of my age living in Brighton at that time would have been machine gunned.

Deliberately. I can remember walking past Kemp Town railway station and this plane swooped over and I looked up and thought, oh God, it’s a German one and it machine gunned all along the road. There was a factory opposite that did vulcanised tyres and I ran into their backyard and jumped into a pile of tyres and pulled a tarpaulin over my head. That plane went around about three times. He was looking for me, I knew it. That’s one time I was really frightened.

As children we used to recognise the sound of a plane engine, oh that’s a Jerry one. We used to call them Kraut cans.

GLADYS EPPS was 19 when war broke out. Her home in Mighell Street was badly damaged during a bombing raid.

I lost my girl friend who lived in White Street.

One of the bosses…was waiting for his bus to go home to Hove when the bomb dropped. He knew where I lived and he came up in a taxi and got my mother and myself in the taxi to go to her brother. I wouldn’t go back there. My poor mother had to go back on her own and clear the house out; she did that all herself.

And I have never been back there since.

By 1944 the Allies were in a powerful position and British, Canadian and American troops gathered on the

Knock on Any Door > War

south coast waiting for the order to invade Germanoccupied Europe. It was known that they would land somewhere in France but not when or where. Often called the best-kept secret of the war, every effort was made to hide the whereabouts of troops and military vehicles. Invasion was postponed twice: the weather and tidal conditions had to be right. There also had to be a full moon.

One morning BERYL TUCKNOTT was woken by a strange noise.

I heard this rumbling, rumble, rumble, rumble unrelenting. I came out, and Jackie came out, and we went down to the Richmond and stood there and there were hundreds and hundreds of tanks and lorries coming through to go to Newhaven to go across.

To wake up and hear it… The ground was shaking, just relentless, you couldn’t get across the road. I think a lot of them had been sheltering under the trees at Preston Park and the Level; anywhere they could go undercover. It was kept so secret.

D-Day, June 6th 1944.

Patrick George War Release Form

> Page 137

WORKING LIVES

In May 1926 the Trades Union Congress called the General Strike to defend mineworkers whose wages were dropping and hours increasing. Their slogan was: Not a penny off the pay – not a minute on the day.

WORKING LIVES “You won’t believe my wages – they were thruppence three farthings an hour.”

Ron Jewell Pre-decimal currency before 1971 Coins Farthing Halfpenny Three penny bit Six penny bit or tanner Florin Half crown 10 shillings One pound Five pounds Four farthings = one penny Two halfpennies = one penny 12 pennies = one shilling Florin = two shillings Half crown = two shillings and six pence 20 shillings = one pound 240 pennies = one pound One shilling is equivalent to five pence and a florin is ten pence.

The farthing ceased to be legal tender in 1960.

Knock on Any Door > Working Life

Support in Brighton was firm; the most complete of any town in the region, and by the second day transport services were at a standstill. All the major incidents of the nine-day strike happened within walking distance of the Tarner area, including the Battle of Lewes Road when 4,000 strikers picketed the tram depot.

As a small boy FRED RICHARDSON witnessed the striker’s desperate anger.

My mind takes me back to when I was six years of age and they tipped a bus over in Grand Parade. (It) used to be the South Down Garage off Grand Parade and the strikers tipped the bus over. It was a double decker with an open top, and I remember coming back and saying to my mother, ‘they tipped the bus over in Grand Parade.’

Most women in Tarner worked. Sometimes their work was outside the home in the kind of jobs that appeared in official statistics, but often they contributed to the family’s income by doing paid work at home and fitting it around their other responsibilities.

JOSIE KNOWELDEN’S grandmother earned a little extra from ironing.

She’d do her washing Mondays, dry it, fold it Tuesdays, get it out again Wednesdays and roll it, damp it, and then iron it all on a Friday – that was her day for ironing and she ironed all day…It was beautiful her ironing, there wasn’t a crease in it.

We had them little irons you put on a stove one at a time; she used to put one on, use it till it got cold, take the other one off, put the other one on – she had about four irons. That was hard work.

She used to do people’s washing and ironing too to earn a bit of money. Most women didn’t go to work

then, not the older generations. I think most nans looked after their daughter’s kids when they went to work.

Ironing was also the way FRED RICHARDSON’S mother was able to add to the meagre family income.

It was an ordinary iron on the gas jet, and she used to spit on it and while she was doing various things she used to keep the water in her mouth and she had a gap in it. Exquisite she was at it.

She might get one and sixpence, one and halfpence, two shillings, something like that. Pound notes we’d never see. She did the washing for people that lived opposite us. They had stalls outside the Palace Pier, push barrows outside the Palace Pier before they had markets and they would work all day and my mother used to do their washing for them.

PATRICIA GEORGE’S mother gave up work when she had another child. When war came she didn’t have a choice.

She had to do factory work, whether she wanted to or not, because my brother was old enough that I could look after him.

When she worked at Allen West (an electrical engineering firm originally based in Coombe Road, which moved to Lewes Road, Moulsecoomb in 1939) she had to stop work again because the cardigan got caught in the machines and the arm got caught and so she had to finish work again. She didn’t work after that for a long time.

MOLLY GRACE’S mother was a barrow girl but took up a new job during the war.

She gave up the barrow to work in the station.

You get a barrow empty, it’s heavy, and to think she was doing it when she was expecting me, I think that’s amazing.

NI Book / Step Back In Time, Brighton Pay Packet / Sue Solly

> Page 141

From what I remember when we moved to St John’s Place, my mother got a job up the station. She used to wear a boiler suit – women never wore trousers then – so when my brother came back from the war he said, ‘Take me up to where Mother is’. So I took him up to the station, and my mum came out, and she was quite tubby, and she had this boiler suit on and she did look quite funny.

She said, ‘Hello my son’, and she started crying, because she’d heard he was wounded at one time and everything, but he came home but he didn’t stay with my mother for very long because he couldn’t put up with her mouth.

As a very small child in the 1950s LORRAINE BEAL helped the other women in the family make gas mantles.

My grandmother, mother and auntie would all sew mantles at home. Well, to make them, they are a tubular material and you are supplied with hundreds in a box and the end has to be sewn up with special string. The mantles then look like a row of little dollies and then the next part was to cut between them all.

Then the mantles had to be turned inside out which was my job and put into neat rows and packed into boxes and returned to the factory. I was only about three or four and I’d sit at the table because we had a large table that filled the room and my job was to turn them inside out and put them in neat little piles and then they’d be packed back in the box to go back to Upper St James’s Street. That’s where the little factory was where you took them back.

The material was like fishing net – that’s a way to describe it – and when you turned them inside out… some had pink tops. Then my grandmother, her sight deteriorated and she wasn’t sewing them correctly so my auntie, her daughter, had to undo them all and sew them up again and send them back.Then she had to stop doing them because her eyesight was failing.

JOSIE KNOWELDEN’S mother and aunts used to sort rags at the rag and bone shop in Chapel Street called Barnes.

You used to get more for white woollies, more white cottons and another price for coloureds – we used to help him separate them all. My mum and my aunties worked there for years, and I mean literally years.

SUE SOLLY remembers how long and hard her Auntie Em worked.

She worked as a cleaner for one of the big cinemas. When the cinema finished at night, being a single woman, it was too late sometimes at night to go down and clean, so she’d get up and do it at five o’ clock in the morning. And living on that hill – I can remember we used to take the mickey out of her but it’s not funny – she used to get up in the morning and get the ashes and the cinders out of the fireplace and chuck them as she went down the hill so she wouldn’t slip, when it was icy – we used to say, ‘don’t forget to take the cinders with you will you?’ It wasn’t funny really.

They gave her a silver-coloured plate for 25 years service to the Rank Organisation; she’d been doing it years before that (but the award was for years she was employed by Rank). That must have meant so much to her, because she never got anything apart from a swimming certificate when she was a little girl. When she was dying in the Sussex County Hospital, and I said to her, ‘What do you need?’ thinking a bottle of squash or some biscuits, and she said, ‘Bring me up that little plate.’

Granny Page – RENE WOOLGAR’S paternal grandmother – had a large family. Her husband was a fisherman who sailed on the hog boats. Obsolete by the beginning of the 20th century, they had a very wide beam which made them easy to drag across shingle beaches and were special to Brighton.

(She) let the top room out for a few shillings. I think she must have had about 13 children altogether.

Knock on Any Door > Working Life

Graffiti on Carlton Hill / 2011 / Jess Huffman

> Page 143

My father was a twin, but the other one died, my father was the youngest. And there was a gap in between, and then she had another lot of children. Well, we wondered, why the gap?

And going through some history, the fishermen used to go on the Hoggie. They used to go on the Hoggie boats right up north to get fish…so he’d be away for awhile and all that. But it was two or three years – whether he found a job up north and then came back we don’t know.

JOAN MOORHOUSE’S father turned his hand to many things in order to make ends meet.

He was a jack of all trades my dad. They had a green grocery stall up on Gardner Street which was on a Saturday, at Christmas time a stand in the wholesale market in Circus Street, and he’d sell Christmas trees and wreaths. He also used to buy and sell horses…he would sometimes do house clearances and sometimes if there was a cheap load of apples or cherries or something he would buy them and he would pitch up on a corner. He turned his hand to anything really and I never knew what to put down as his occupation on the school forms – General Dealer I think it used to be.

I’m trying to remember, there was also some stables at the bottom of Edward Street, there used to be a furniture shop called Howard Robinson’s I think it was, on the corner and behind that was a vet’s and he had these stables and so my dad used to use the stables for the horses. My brother used to ride them – they’d go up to Haywards Heath or something and he used to ride bareback my brother, he loved it. I think back to how my father first got involved with horses – I mean that was his real love – it was to do with the circus. He didn’t have much education but confidence he did have.

Mike Watts Fishmongers St James’s Street Brighton / Chloe Howley

Knock on Any Door > Working Life

JEAN COLLINS’ father also had a number of jobs.

My dad was a painter and decorator, he trudged all over Brighton in all weathers. He worked from Ashdown’s – the other side of Ivory Place, Morley Street way. It was like a builder’s and they sort of packed up when the war started. My dad didn’t get called up, he got turned down because he had flat feet or something.

Mind you, he had a dangerous job: he worked down in Portsmouth dockyard for most of the war.

He ended up at Kemp Town Station as a porter until he retired – it’s gone now.

PATRICK GEORGE was living in Richmond Hill when he and a neighbour, Johnny Newton, became delivery boys in 1937.

We got a job offered us by Bert Payne to do deliveries but we had to do it with a barrow. I used to get up Saturday mornings to go up to North Road. He had all the barrows up there, terrific great things they were. The barrow itself, I’m not exaggerating if I said it was six-foot from front to back, with handles.

I used to go up there as early as I could because the barrows were all numbered – one, two, three, four, five, six – but number six was the lightest one. It was a really nice barrow to push, it was nicely balanced and everything.

Bert Payne used to load the groceries in wicker baskets and he’d load each one up with its individual delivery and put the label on it, and load the barrow up, and Johnny Newton and myself used to push that.

We used to go Richmond Hill to Carlton Hill to Mighell Street to Edward Street, then we’d go up Eastern Road.

Just as you get past all the hospitals and the big posh school on the left-hand side, on the other side there’s a garage, and there’s a road that comes across there, there was a parade of houses and that was where we started our deliveries from.

And the job was to take the baskets – never to the front door – always down the steps, to the door there, and wait. When you see this on the films now with the cook in the kitchen, little sergeant majors you might

say, and they were always the same, they’d come to the door, very strict they were and they’d look you up and down, very abrupt with you. They were the staff – you never saw the people themselves.

I got three shillings – that was a fortune.

Sometimes we were lucky and we used to get a tip – but they never give it to your hand, they’d always give it on a plate. Never sure whether it was that they didn’t want to touch you or what it was.

Mum would have most of it, but I’d get about sixpence to myself and that was it.

In the 1950s RON BURTENSHAW found plenty of ways of earning a little extra including selling rabbit skins to FRED RICHARDSON. My family was quite poor, particularly in the early days just after the war. One way of earning a few pennies was to collect rabbit skins (rabbits were a staple diet for a lot of people).

They would be washed and dried and then taken to Richardson’s in Chapel Street and sold for three pence each (old money).

Rag and bone men would make regular visits, riding down the street with a horse and cart, shouting out ‘Old Rags and Lumber.’ If you had any old clothing or rags, you could earn the odd goldfish or a balloon.

Another way to supplement your pocket money was to collect clean old newspapers and sell them to the local fish and chip shops for wrapping their wares; again for three pence or a bag of chips. This practice soon came to an end after the smallpox outbreak in 1950/51.

New hygiene regulations started to come in and old used newspapers were out.

As we grew older there was always the running of errands, particularly for the elderly, that brought a few pennies in for sweets and comics.

As soon as I reached the grand old age of 14, I was doing a paper round for Messrs Croydon, newsagents in Richmond Buildings, delivering newspapers to the slum dwellers in the Albion Hill areas, and supplementing my income by doing milk rounds. This income did not go

> Page 145

far if I was to help in putting money into the house for my poor mother. I found a more permanent job for the weekends and holidays. I became an animal keeper in the Aquarium, helping to look after chimpanzees, monkeys, sea lions and penguins – quite a dangerous job for a boy, but I loved it.

When the aquarium was closed between the holiday season, I was not needed so I would usually spend my time fishing off the Palace Pier or Banjo Groyne.

I worked there for two years until I was 16 and had to leave so as to study for my leaving exams at school.

RON JEWELL won a scholarship that would have given free secondary education, but his family couldn’t afford the extras. Instead of going to grammar school he had to work full time from the age of 14.

I had to take a job in a factory. Could you imagine, a factory with brains. It drove me mad and my wages – you won’t believe my wages – they were thruppence three farthings an hour.

And that was it…

When you reached 16 you were working from half-past seven in the morning to half-past seven at night.

And when you were 18 you were working till about halfpast eight at night. And you worked Saturday afternoons.

Later on in life, when I was a bit older, when I was doing night work, I was working from eight till eight, and I had to go to Portslade, an hour each way on the buses.

And that was seven days a week, and you got that for six months at a time. You were dead before you were finished, you were a zombie.

I worked at Allen West engineering factory. Then the war came, and as I was one of the experienced engineers, they took me away from here to Dennis Brothers on the big engineering. (Dennis Brothers made vehicles of all description – during wartime they were a leading tank manufacturer.) I was there for about six months then I went in the army.

Knock on Any Door > Working Life

FRED RICHARDSON was born in the same year as RON. He got his first job in 1933.

I left school at 14. I worked for M. Freeman and I learnt everything – I could climb 60, 70 foot and I was good at cutting and welding and all that lark. When I first started with Freeman it was a lot of money. I used to get a pound a week, but the job was very hard, it was a 60 hour week and all the rest of it. I used to come home filthy dirty.

I worked for them for quite a while until I was 16 and Arthur Breach my foreman said ‘he’s entitled for a rise’ and they rose my money to two quid a week. Now that was a lot of money for a boy of 16. A postman would be lucky to get two quid a week. A bus driver, anything, would be lucky to get two quid a week. On the firm, the main pay was a shilling an hour, (the equivalent of five pence today) a 60 hour week for three quid, and I was 16 years old and the general foreman said to the governor: ‘He’s doing exactly the same job as the others.’

I’d already cut down all the railings around Preston Park – it had big high railings, cast-iron railings, the whole of Preston Park, can you imagine right the way round, and I’d done that on my own. And he said: ‘He’s entitled to the same wages as them’ and I got three quid a week – I couldn’t believe it.

I come home and said: ‘Mum, I get three quid a week’ and she took two, I worked for Freeman right up to the war.

PATRICIA GEORGE left school at 14. She started work in 1938 at Channel dry cleaners.

It was a shop that done all the forces’ uniforms and the evening dresses and all things like that; it was quite nice… so in there you’d got three women doing the pressing, and then you’ve got two doing the ironing, so that when these evening dresses come in, they steam them and then when they went to the press, they had to do it with an iron and then for the evening suits, they used to press them.The manageress there she laid all the dresses out, put tissue papers all through the sleeves and

Brighton Dolphinarium / Postcard

> Page 147

Pullinger’s Shoe Repair Shop / George Street, Brighton / Chloe Howley

Knock on Any Door > Working Life

wrap them all up and then fold them and put them in boxes.

(We worked) Eight o’ clock until six o’ clock at night; and we’d have ten minutes break in the morning, an hour’s break lunchtime, and then ten minutes in the afternoon. You’d got to clock (on) about eight o’ clock in the morning and you couldn’t clock (off) until six o’ clock at night, because you’d lose your money.

It was only ten shillings (a week): I had to give five to my mum and keep five to myself, because I had to pay for my lunch if I wanted some chips or anything, I got to pay for it, and my bus fare, and things like that, so I didn’t have a lot of money, and I had to pay for my own clothes as well, so I used to say ‘I can’t afford…’ I used to get a bit fed up with it because it was all day standing on your feet, you couldn’t sit down…

JEAN COLLINS left school at 14. She started work in 1943.

I went into a baker’s; I worked with somebody else to start with and then all of a sudden they said ‘we want you in that shop there’, and I could only have been 15 then and I sort of had charge of the shop. But later on I went to Marks and Spencer’s, that’s where I spent most of my working life.

At 14 my wage was about 25 shillings a week.

(My parents) weren’t that strict, they’d ask me where I was going and who I was going with, but you didn’t go many places in those days because you didn’t have the money that kids have now. You’d got round about a pound or something at that age when you first went out to work; my mother used to say, ‘be sensible with it’...

MOLLY GRACE started work two years after the war ended.

My birthday’s in March – if it had been in April you could stay in school till you were 15 I think, but I just missed it by a few weeks. I loved school – the friends that I made, having a good school dinner…

When I was 14 I was to start work at Cox’s Pill factory on Lewes Road.

Mrs Inkpen (a friend of Molly’s mother) used to go to jumble sales and buy clothes then sell them on for a few shillings more. I didn’t own a decent coat so my mum bought one for a half crown. Mrs Inkpen brought this coat down, it had a heavy beaver collar, a heavy coat, and was miles too long. So my Mum stood me on a table but as I tried it on I buckled at the knees under the weight of it. ‘Oh’ she said, ‘It wants a bit cut off the bottom and the sleeves and everything.’ She simply cut a lump off the bottom and the sleeves. My hair was cut short and I had a fringe, still wearing strap shoes and ankle socks I did look a sketch all five-foot two of me.

Well, I used to swan around in it making out I was wearing it to work, but as soon as I got round the corner I used to throw it in the bushes by the church and pick it up on the way back, making out I’d worn it all day; and I was freezing cold in the winter, because I didn’t have any coat.

My education took a sharp turn when I entered the adult world of life at work in a factory. The crude talk, hard work and misery of mind was hard for me, I would sit and look up at the high grilled, filthy windows and watch my youth slip away and long for freedom.

It was a penny on the bus to go along Lewes Road then, and a penny back; and then I had to walk right up Carlton Hill because we lived at the top, and it was long old walk, but I hated that factory work… it was all medical stuff, all tablets and stuff like that. A pound a week, that’s all I got. And we used to do the washing up, me and this girl, and we used to have a supervisor and she was an old dragon: ‘How long does it take you to wash up a few cups? Get up here!’ she used to shout, sounds just like my mother. And I thought, ‘I don’t like you, so I’m leaving’; ‘Well it’s your loss’, I thought, ‘You must be joking, my loss?’ I nearly called her a name, but I didn’t. I just left.

At age 15 JOSIE KNOWELDEN left school and within days had started work.

> Page 149

I left on the Friday and started on the Monday… at a shop that did nylon repairs, they used to do nylon repairs in them days. Just up Edward Street – never moved far away – there was about 12 of us that worked there. I stayed there about two years. I used to give her (her grandmother who brought her up) a pound but I used to borrow it back on Mondays, so it was never really hers. My nan spoiled us… I was proud when I used to give it to her on a Friday, and begging when I used to borrow it back on a Monday.

RON BURTENSHAW saw an advert in the Argus for a junior draughtsman. It was June 1957 and he was 17.

With my interest in engineering and skill in technical drawing I applied for the post and a week later, I was offered the position as a junior illustrator at the enormous wage of £11 per week, with paid travel expenses. The job entailed working in London for ‘Machinery Publishing Co’ (the head office was in Brighton). Considering the average wage for a school leaver was in the region of £4 per week, I was rich, and able to support my widowed mother.

A typical working day would start by commuting to London on the 07.30 train and travelling by bus to my office by 09.00. I would return home to Brighton by about 20.00 hours.

The capital was enormous, dirty and noisy, particularly for a boy from a quiet seaside town. My mother was warning me not to go anywhere near Soho, all vice and gangsters. That was a joke, because the bus drove right through Soho, past all the big theatres; I never did tell her. The editorial offices of Machinery Publishing Co. were on the Euston Road, right opposite St Pancras Station and Kings Cross.

Working in London! I was the envy of all the boys in the Tarner area.

After about 18 months I gave it all up and worked in architecture. My family was not impressed as they were all engineers; why should I change to work in the building industry. I studied at the Northern Polytechnic

Two Shillings 1949

Knock on Any Door > Working Life

in North London, gathering extra ‘O’ & ‘A’ levels on the way.

I grew up to eventually become a Project Director with the third largest Architectural practice in the UK. For a while I lived and worked in Dubai in the UAE.The recession in 1990 brought my career to an end, however I decided to retrain. Attending the University of Kent, and other educational establishments, I became a Horticulturalist and Landscape Designer in 1995.

Not a bad career for a boy that was brought up on the edge of the slum area of Brighton.

MOLLY GRACE drifted from job to job after she left the Lewes Road factory.

My mother said ‘take the job that pays the most’ all I earned was £1 a week for an eight-hour day. I longed for Fridays. I drifted, never out of work but having a go at anything, looking for excitement away from drudgery.

Most girls dreamt of marriage but I did want to escape from the grind.

I moved from job to job I was nursing by night then worked for Boots the chemist, then worked for the same as a security guard. I also worked at St Dunstan’s as a V.A.D (nursing assistant). I loved the job – in my week’s holiday I would work at Brighton Racecourse.

PATRICIA GEORGE was fed up with dry cleaning but her mother told her that she had to find another job before she left.

So there was a job going at Woolworths, up Western Road, so I went and enquired there. The manager, said, ‘Where do you work?’, ‘Up the Channel Laundry’, so he said, ‘Oh, so you’re not used to shop work?’…but nothing was over sixpence, everything was sixpence in there, so they said ‘Yeah, all right then.’

They put me on the jewellery counter, and you’d get all these rings, brooches and then you’d get the girls, ‘Oh, I’ve lost my wedding ring – can I try it on?’ and they used to get out thruppence or sixpence and then try

them on… ‘Oh yeah, that’ll replace my wedding ring’… you knew they just wanted to go with the soldiers and you just knew they were going to stay somewhere for one night… it was a good laugh because you knew what it was for.

FRED RICHARDSON had a very successful career in the scrap business when he returned from the war.

When I came back I went into the fruit business in quite a big way. And I used to have several of the boys work for me, we used to pitch all along Western Road with barrows and then on Sundays we used to work the beach, running across the beach with trays of peaches on our heads, and at the racetracks and all that lark.

A fellow I met in the army, a brigadier, he took over the NAAFI (Navy, Army, Airforce Institutes – an organisation that provides catering and leisure services to the armed forces) called me up and he said ‘Richardson’, and I said ‘Sir, what’s it all about?’ and he said, ‘Get back into the scrap business’This was in 1949/50 – he said, ‘do as I tell you.’

So I went back into the scrap business and of course the Korean War came up didn’t it? And I got a fortune overnight.

I had a yard that I sold to American Express in Mighell Street. Morrison’s (St James’s Street) used to belong to me. I had a big scrapyard in there. My HQ was in Eastbourne, I had 6,000 square feet there. And then I had another one just outside Brussels, in Belgium.

I had about 35 working for me, trucks all over the place – all in the scrap game. And I was in the woollen game quite a lot. I knew the woollen game inside out and I used to buy from a lot of the big merchants; sometimes shipped to Spain, sometimes shipped to Belgium as well.

I used to sort colours as well, I had good eyesight then, it was amazing how many people were colour blind. The main thing in the wool game is the dyeing: when it goes back most of it’s been knitted again, and you sort the pale yellows and the deep yellows and pinks and the reds and all that lark and I could do that then – I wish I could now.

> Page 151

Knock on Any Door > Working Life

Jimmy Richardson’s Barbers / George St / Brighton 2012 / Chloe Howley

> Page 153

I was very well known all over the town. Max Miller, used to be very good, he used to come through, and Max Miller used to shout up, ‘Richie, pay your rates!’ he used to scream at me.

Brighton’s the HQ of the knocker boys: the knocker boys would knock and buy whatever they can, gold, silver, antiques, anything. They go all over the country – they leave here every Monday morning, come home on Thursday mornings to sell on Fridays. There must be 200 or 300 go out.

You get the two towns: you get the Pompey mob and the Brighton mob – all knocker boys, all villains, double-dyed villains. They originated in the rag business, they used to be called totters before that, and they used to come into my yard to the 1960s and then after that they learnt the antique game.

The winter of 1947 was one of the worst winters of the 20th century. RON JEWELL has a very good reason for remembering it.

We were shut out for two weeks from all the factories because they couldn’t work because it was too cold. It was the only time in my life I’d drawn unemployment money. Never in my life was I unemployed.

Husbands and wives didn’t always tell each other how much they were earning as MOLLY GRACE discovered.

When he (her first husband) got his wages, he used to turn his back to me… and then one day he was up the fire station steps, you know on the ladder – he was an asphalter by trade – and he slipped, and to save himself he broke both wrists putting them through the rungs of the ladder and he was up the hospital and he was still black as soot when they put him in the bed, because they hadn’t x-rayed him properly, it did look funny, in a spotlessly clean bed and a black face. My little girl screamed and ran out the door: ‘That’s not Daddy!’

Knock on Any Door > Working Life

Anyway…his manager, he came up on the Friday with his wages – well I never thought he earned that much. I thought, well he’s never given me… you know, I could have killed him, and I thought you rotten bugger.

PAUL DOYLE’S first job was as a pageboy at the Metropole Hotel when he was 15. But it was from his late teens that he started his working life in Tarner in demolition, labouring and building sites. Paul worked on the demolition of houses in the Carlton Hill area and the construction of the American Express building in 1977. Here he recalls what existed there before the demolition began…

Divisional houses going back to the 30s – ‘divisional’ houses means it’s usually cobbled walls and just two storey, outside toilet, you know if you think of typical backstreet like Coronation Street, it was a bit like that, with washing hanging out in the backyards.

Working on William Street and John Street – where the police station is today – Paul remembers a typical working day.

In those days…you could burn all the wood out, so you gutted it out and you’d do one house a day. Don’t take long to clear them… you strip it all out first, pop all the wood inside and set light to it basically… you take all the beams, any wood you save, so the rubbish just gets burned and the rest is salvage, any slates there or bricks even…

It was mostly local people (I worked with), some of them I met when I was living up Moulsecoomb as a boy and I ended up working with them off and on for the rest of my life…

I met (my wife) up the Regent Cinema…

I knocked it down, nothing personal. The Regent was where the Boots is, top of North Street.

(We got paid) roughly seven pound a week I think, not really (enough to live on): you made it up, you got what they called perks, like lead and copper and stuff like that, and the enjoyment of the actual work, I actually enjoyed it; the danger as well, because that’s part of the element you know… on demolitions

Pat Mears Donated Photo / Family Business

> Page 155

there’s definite danger: you could fall off the roof. There was no rules, there was no safety rules at all, so it was down to you at the time, and it was all by hand as well, sledgehammers and mallets – now its machines isn’t it? Funnily enough (there were no accidents) because I think we knew what we were doing…

(There was good camaraderie on the site) because of the danger, the hard work, a bit like the army I suppose. It was word of mouth in those days: if you’d done a good job you were recommended elsewhere.

At the shoe factory SHIRLEY TIDEY packed shoes while her husband-to-be JOHN worked on the machine that fixed soles to the uppers. Shirley then moved to a better paid job.

In the sack factory I was a machinist. You just had to sew them, mend them, darn them. Oh, they did use to smell. Smelly old bacon wraps as they used to call them.

It wasn’t really a nice job but the money was good.

GRAHAM SMITH has vivid memories of how he joined Brighton and Hove bus company.

I’d been working for Unilever and I never got promotion and I was a bit annoyed about this and I thought to myself, what else is there? And I went down to American Express. They thought I was over-qualified for this particular job and I just happened to go into the job centre and said ‘Have you got any jobs in a computer field?’ and they started laughing, ‘All we’ve got here is manual jobs, unless you want to be a bus driver.’

‘Yeah, ok, I’ll have a go.’

And I was given two interviews to go to the Brighton Hove & District Bus Company, which was then part of South Down, over at Conway Street, or to go to Lewes Road in the afternoon for the Corporation Company. I’d been out to Conway Street in the morning and I’d been put in a bus and no one had told me what to do or anything like that; and there’s this old boy there who was the chief driving instructor, and he would shout before he would think.

Knock on Any Door > Working Life

I was rather upper-class and pompous in those days, ‘Do you mind not shouting at me? Right at the moment I’m a member of the public, not one of your employees, so don’t shout at me.’ I crunched the gears and got back out of the bus and said, ‘Oh, you drive it back to the garage.’

When we got back to the garage he kept me waiting for 20 minutes while he fidgeted around and in the end he came back and he said, ‘Well there’s not a lot I can say really, it was you that got out of the cab. Perhaps you’d like to try again in six months’ time?’

I thought you prat, I banged my fist down on his desk and said ‘What do you expect me to be in the meantime, a conductor?’ And I talked myself into being one of the last conductors that was ever taken on.

I had six months or thereabouts as a conductor and absolutely loved it.

MALCOLM KEEPING came from a family of engineers but his father didn’t want him to follow in their footsteps.

When he came home and changed his clothes and had a good wash, he used to say, ‘You want a job where you can go to work and wear the same clothes’ – in other words a clean job. So they got me into an electrical firm in Hove…long since gone, terrible place it was, and I went there from school and I lasted ten weeks…then went to Southern Rentals, and that’s where I stayed for 28 years.

I worked on televisions; ending up managing two of their shops, Uckfield and Crowborough; so I used to travel up to Uckfield every day, regardless of weather. It was quite nice actually because I was my own boss. And I was there for the country, going to all these nice houses.

We ended up I think it was 50 shops scattered around and something like 250 vans. Later on of course they went on to using estate cars with the name on the side. That’s how the business increased: it was the largest independent company in the country. And then the boss decided to sell out to Rediffusion: I didn’t last there more than about a year I suppose. I was made redundant.Then

Rediffusion got taken over themselves by Granada. And then Granada merged with Radio Rentals. And now they don’t exist at all. That’s another industry that’s literally just died, because televisions are so reliable now. They don’t break down and basically people have got more money in their pockets, so they’re able to go and buy one.

If we had a television which worked for say six months without a service call that was good.

a beautiful sort of dipped garden with a stone in the middle with an angel on it.

As you come out the back door of Tarner’s Home to go down into the gardens, on that wall she (Miss Tarner) had her dogs made in plaster and they were sat on the wall, black and white, coated, beautiful dogs and really lifelike…

GAYE HUGHES was a sister at Tarner Home in the 1980s and 1990s.

PAT MEARS worked in the fruit and vegetable market in Circus Street and remembers when the Although it was originally stated that patients Albion football team came visiting one night in 1983. contributed to their care, this was not the case. The committee who ran the trust launched a fund to raise the I was parked outside the all night cafe with the fees and upkeep, it received many legacies and had many lorry, and it was when the Albion went to Wembley beneficiaries as well as countless and constant fundraising and they were in the cup. I knew one or two of them activities in which we the staff were very involved. to say hello to – well actually I knew Foster. (Albion’s Patients came from all walks of life, the only centre half, known for the white headband he always criteria being that they were suffering from an incurable wore. He didn’t play at Wembley but did in the replay.) condition, they were admitted for respite care, symptom When I used to see him in the club he’d say ‘Hi-de-Hi’ control and terminal care, there was no definitive time because he said I looked like the guy on the (television) scale, beds were rarely vacant. programme.

As a building, it was charming and homely though Anyway, I’ve gone into the market to get not very practical but installing a lift made life easier for something and when I come out I’ve got the whole patients and staff, one sensed its history within its fabric. football team – well 90 percent of the football team – It had a wonderful Regency veranda and beautiful walled stacking the lorry up. They were absolutely legless. The garden which patients and families enjoyed frequently; it money they were worth was a lot more than the food. I surely was a little oasis for them. had to coax them off.

However as time went by, it became expensive to run, it did not conform to modern standards and health authority requirements and sadly closed in 1997, but When PATRICK GEORGE was demobbed from the staff and patients moved to the new Martlet’s Hospice Navy, as a qualified plumber he was employed by Gates in Hove, together with Coppercliff ,and taking its ethos & Sons who had a contract with Tarner Home. into a modern hospice setting.

I was on call all the time there.They’d got all new equipment out and it was all going wrong and I spent a long, long time in Tarner’s Home itself… I was there when they had the storm (in 1987), all the trees and everything blew down. It demolished all the beautiful gardens in Tarner’s Home. In the bottom section it had

JOSIE DARLING was a nurse at Tarner Home in the 1990s. She says it taught her everything she knows about nursing.

I had only lived in Brighton a few months when I discovered the Tarner Home. I was 24 and had a toddler,

> Page 157

and was pregnant with my second child. I had been doing agency nursing at night around some dodgy nursing homes which smelt of urine and abandonment, and a few shifts in remote patients’ homes or Hove General Hospital where old men coughed phlegm into spittoons and we never got a break.

The Tarner Home was a hospice for people with cancer. It was a genteel Regency building with room for about 12 patients, all in separate rooms, with narrow staircases in between. There was a sea view from most of the sash windows. I remember the smell of polish in the entrance hall. There was a comfortable sitting room with a budgie, then a staff dining room and a huge generous kitchen with an Aga, where heavenly food was produced. The garden was lawned with flowers around the edge, and some regular seagulls came every day for scraps. A cat decided to adopt us; her name was Tilly.

I had recently done my nurse training in a busy London hospital, where we rushed around like wasps, and often the conditions were harsh, with not enough pillow cases, dollops of bland disgusting food and not much tender loving care for the patients. When I did my first shift at the Tarner Home I was amazed that we could use real flannels, not disposable ones, and I quickly learnt how to turn and wash a dying person so gently they found it pleasant.

The patients were given small, beautifully presented meals on trays with flowers and a teapot each, a doily, tiny sandwiches with the crusts cut off, or a slice of homemade cake. There was wine or sherry, delicious dinners, and the lightest pastry.

The patients’ needs were paramount, so that if they wanted a softer pillow, one of us might nip down to Vokins, the old department store on North Street, to buy a duck down one. Patients’ symptoms were always prioritised and they were given adequate pain relief. When I worked in hospitals I had met nurses and doctors who had regarded some patients as scheming nuisances, who were lying about their pain to get more drugs, but at the Tarner Home, no patient, however tricky, was disliked and nothing was too much trouble.

I was also surprised that we as nurses were treated with respect and dignity and took proper breaks.

Knock on Any Door > Working Life

We were served a fine free lunch in the middle of our shift, where we sat around the dining room table with silver and napkins. The cooks Barbara and Jean served us cheese and biscuits with our coffee and sponge cake with our afternoon tea.

It was warm and cosy there on night shifts, when the wind got up and the sea looked rough. After we had settled the patients we could sit in the soft armchairs around the gas fires and tell each other everything, like girls having a sleep over, until the next ‘round’ with our torches, creeping up the creaky stairs.

One of the patients lived in the annexe. She was there for months and we all loved her. I remember one old gent on the top floor opened the top drawer of his locker and showed me a shiny pistol in a box when I took him his scrambled egg, on a wintry night. All the patients could smoke in their rooms.

When the doctor came in with his tweed jacket on, we would do him a little tray with coffee and biscuits, and sit down for a civilised handover. Once a year he would invite all the nurses to his posh house for a party where his wife would provide amazing trifles. Matron had an office, where she served bereaved relatives brandy in a dignified fashion.

Such an old building had some disadvantages.

When somebody died, it was not easy for the undertakers, as the lift did not take a bed, so bodies would have to be taken down in the lift standing up. I learnt how to wash a dead person nicely, talking to them all the time, for respect.

The Tarner Home was spotless and the housekeeper wore a pinny like you might have seen in the 50s. I worked there until it closed in 1997, but it was only 1994 when I started so it was old-fashioned really. I was captured by the high standards and the romance of the place. I was young to work with so much death and dying but it taught me that it does not have to be grim.

I still work as a nurse in palliative care now; the Tarner Home taught me everything.

In 1997 Tarner Home merged with two other charities – Coppercliff Hospice and MacMillan Day Hospice – to become The Martlets Hospice. The three birds in the logo represent the three charities.

Mike Watts / Jimmy Richardson / Shop signs / Chloe Howley

> Page 159

EDUCATION >

A new Education Act in 1944 raised the school leaving age to 15 and provided free secondary education for all.

Brighton, like most other education authorities, developed three types of secondary education: Grammar • Technical Colleges • Secondary Moderns – where the majority of children went

EDUCATION “We would spend half the week doing academic studies and the rest of the week doing trade studies…We were able to make flashings around chimneys and even plumb a bathroom.”

Who went where was decided by an examination taken at the age of 11

Comprehensive education rolled out across England and Wales from the mid 1960s, although a few areas still have grammar schools today. In Brighton comprehensive schools started to be phased in from September 1975, by which date most educational Ron Burtenshaw authorities had abandoned the 11 plus examination.

After the Education Act of 1918, all children had to stay in school until they were 14. In many schools a mixed infant department was on the ground floor of the building.

Pupils were promoted upstairs at the age of seven – boys and girls often having separate entrances as well as separate classrooms.

Grammar schools were fee-paying but offered a number of free places to children from poor families who passed the scholarship exam. Parents were often forced to turn down the free place, however, because they still could not afford the extra costs involved.

Knock on Any Door > Education

During World War II the Ministry of Information promoted Tarnerland Nursery as a model school, describing the children as spending: “blissfully happy days climbing trees, playing with water, eating, sleeping and amusing themselves.”

This idyllic portrayal reflected official government policy.

Mothers of pre-school children were encouraged to go to work because they were needed for munitions factories and other vital war work. According to the ministry, Tarnerland also taught children good social habits – table manners, hygiene and how to get on with other children peaceably.

The school opened in 1935 and was built on part of the garden donated by Miss Letitia Tarner. For the first few years it was funded by private donations until it was taken over by Brighton Borough Council in 1937. In 1944 – the time of the Ministry of Information report – the headmistress was Miss Sutton. She and her team

of three cared for 50 children between the ages of two to five.

The school now caters for 80 children from three months to five years. In the most recent Ofsted inspection in November 2010 the school was described as outstanding. The report went on to say: “It provides children with a very safe, nurturing environment where they can thrive and flourish. Excellent relationships and a whole-staff commitment to meeting the specific needs of each child ensure exceptional outcomes.”

Born in 1927, RENE WOOLGAR has fond memories of her time at school.

We used to have fireplaces with beautiful fires in the classrooms and that’s where the milk crates were in the winter because they used to rise up with the frost. It would make the top of the milk come out of the round cardboard corks, and you could push a hole in the middle and you were given a straw. I think it was a ha’penny for a bottle, a third of a pint. And you know some poor kids couldn’t afford the ha’penny. I had a little friend, I used to have half and give her the other half. You know, because she was really poor.

And Miss Mullins used to bring old pieces of clean rag, it might be a sheet cut up or something, and anyone who had a cold she’d give them a bit of rag.

I always remember that, because otherwise they didn’t have hankies.

In 1939, aged three, JOAN MOORHOUSE was in the nursery class of Carlton Hill First School.

There was quite a big room with two big rocking horses and a sand pit and an open fire with the guard around and I remember my dress getting wet on one occasion – we had teacher’s assistants in those days and she took my dress off and dried it by the fire. We used to have to go to sleep in the afternoons so after lunch

there would be all these camp beds laid out and we’d lie down on there.

BERYL TUCKNOTT went to Richmond Street School until the age of seven. She then transferred to Finsbury Road Junior School. Here she remembers best friends, sports days and school dinners.

At Richmond Street School we had an elderly headmistress – all the teachers seemed elderly, as children. She used to sit on a high wooden stool in the hall and read to us. She used to sit with her knees apart, showing her ‘fearnoughts’, her ‘passion-killers’ with us sat on the floor looking up.The boys thought it was hilarious.

(Going) to Finsbury Road Junior School meant walking up to the end of my street, up Albion Hill – very steep – along Grove Street, across Southover Street to Southampton Street where the entrance to the school was, between two houses. We walked everywhere then, and on our own – we were sent to the clinic on our own, and to the dentist. My mum couldn’t come she was in the shop. I spent most of my time with Jackie and her mum, she was lovely, she was more of a mum than my mum was. We were literally like sisters, everybody used to say, ‘You two are like sisters.’

The headmaster at Finsbury Road was Mr Brown who’d taught my dad at Park Street, lovely man, very kind, he lived with his wife in Tower Road, Queen’s Park. Once a year they would invite a few pupils for tea in their garden during the summer term. It was him who wrote to my mother telling her to stop me drinking my milk because it was doing me more harm than good; it just made me sick. I’ve never drunk it since and hate anything milky.

We would have a sports day once a year at Queen’s Park, no training or anything; we only had a tarmac playground which was divided into two parts, boys and girls. Occasionally we would be taken to St Luke’s swimming pool, we would be dangled on the end of a very long bamboo rod strapped in a canvas belt – I didn’t like it and never did learn to swim.

> Page 163

I remember the school dinners, particularly the fatty lamb served in watery gravy with hard peas or overcooked cabbage and horrible dehydrated potato, lumpy mash potato. This was very heavy, sticky and gluey.

We weren’t allowed to leave anything on the plate, we had to eat every morsel, so we stuck lumps of potato under the table.When the tables were folded for stacking the horrible grey lumps were visible. The sweets were hard sponges spread with jam and served with lumpy custard or milky puddings which I hated.

Even when the teachers were fierce – as JOHN STEVENS remembers them – there were sometimes ways to get them on your side.

I remember Miss Finch, she was one of the old people who came back because everyone was getting called up in the war and they brought back all the old retired teachers.

Every morning Joycey – my cousin – and myself used to have to go to the fish market to get granddad’s fish – the fish used to come into the market which was at the bottom of the hill. We used to go down there with a pushchair and get a pack of fish and bring it up home to mum. Granddad was a fisherman, he went trawling, he used to sail out of Newhaven.

And I was late for school one day because the truck that brought the fish from the harbour was late, and Miss Finch asked me why I was late and I said I had to get Granddad’s fish, and straight away she started asking me what fish… and it was a couple of days afterwards that she said, ‘Jonathan, do you think your granddad could get me a crab?’ And I said, ‘I’ll ask him Miss’; and when he came home at the weekend, I asked him and he sent home a crab for her, and Mum cooked it and I took it into her, and after that I couldn’t do a thing wrong.

School dinners were important to MOLLY GRACE. I was three and a half when I was put in (Convent) school, but they understood because my mother had to

Knock on Any Door > Education

work.... And the nuns used to say when we were going home, ‘Have you had breakfast my child?’ and we told the truth, ‘No, Sister.’

They’d give you bread and dripping and a mug of cocoa and we were never sick – toast and dripping you’d think what a mixture – and then one of the nuns (had) a glass bottle and it was always full of sweets, and every Friday she’d go round and give you a sweet, we thought it was wonderful. She gave you a token every Friday to go to the bread shop and we got two free loaves of bread, and you’d take that home.

I went to Carlton Hill School and I think this was when the school meals started, during the war; they never charged us because we didn’t have any money and all the children sat down to a hot meal every day, which was wonderful, every school day. But I must have been dragged up, because I remember one of these women holding the cutlery out to me and she said, ‘Look, she can’t even take the cutlery.’You know, she was humiliating me, anyway, I was a bit cheeky, and if you were cheeky you had to go and stand by the blackboard or outside the headmaster’s office until he come out with a cane, but he never caned the girls: he used to go, ‘Go on, get back to school’, but the boys he used to wallop them one.

Then we went just across the road to the senior school. Our headmistress, her name was Miss Grout, and we always used to pretend to drop something on the floor, because Miss Grout used to sit at this machine and she used to put her hanky in her knickers, the bloomers came down by her knees, so she’d sit like that, and we’d always make out to drop something to laugh at Miss Grout – poor Miss Grout! Anyway, she was very kind.

RON BURTENSHAW started school at St Luke’s just after the war ended.

This school was a very large, red brick building with playgrounds surrounding it on three sides. In fact, nearly the whole length of St Luke’s Terrace was allocated to the school grounds. The school was divided up into three areas: there were the infants, with a separate

Fred Richardson Swimming Competition 1931 Swimming Certificate / Patrick George 1935

> Page 165

entrance off Queen’s Park Rise; the juniors – with a bridge access, over the boiler rooms – from St Luke’s Terrace and there was another part (senior school).

The headmistress was a Miss Edghill, a short, rotund little woman with black hair, worn in a bun, a woman that could be strict, but also understanding at the same time.

PATRICK GEORGE missed crucial examinations because of illness.

When I was in St John’s that’s when I had that diphtheria, through having that I missed all the examinations, so they’d already appointed everybody to their new school. The majority of St. John’s moved to St. Luke’s, but when I came out of hospital and I went back they said, ‘No, you go to Hanover Terrace’, so I had to go to Hanover Terrace – it was a shame because I didn’t have any mates, and I went to a new school with completely different people but luckily it was a lovely school. Hanover was always a very good school, so it wasn’t too bad.

RON JEWELL won a scholarship that would have given him free grammar school education. However, there were still extras to pay for and he would have been expected to stay at school until he was 16. Like many other families, his parents could not afford to let him take up the place he had won.

I went to Richmond Street School from five up to ten when I was a kid and after that I went to Circus Street School, for boys from ten to 14.

I won a scholarship but I couldn’t go, we were too poor. There was nine of us in our family, five boys and four girls, and Dad was a First World War invalid.

BERYL TUCKNOTT has good reason to remember her 11th birthday.

At the front, Patricia George at School Patricia George at School

Knock on Any Door > Education

On my birthday the school received the results of the 11 plus exam; the names of those who had passed were announced in assembly in front of the whole school.

Six were successful, I was one of them, the only girl. I think that was a good number for such a small school.

We had to go to the front and be congratulated by the headmaster and whole school. I was very embarrassed.

Mum and Dad had promised me a watch if I passed, I never got one though.

I won’t say I was ostracised, but I felt I was different because the others all went together to Pelham Street intermediary or somewhere, and I had to go all the way up to Varndean on my own every day.

Jackie went to Pelham Street and that’s the only time we kind of drifted apart, but then we got back together again and we did use to see each other but it wasn’t the same, because I had to do two or three hours homework every night for a start, which my dad thought was dreadful – ‘you’re supposed to learn what you need at school, not come home with another lot, you know.’

I was kind of shunned I suppose, it was strange.

It was a strange atmosphere, kids… ‘Oooh, she goes to Varndean’, that sort of thing. Kids can be cruel.

Other schools, secondary (modern) schools, left at 15 but when I went to Varndean, Mum and Dad had to sign a form to say that I would stay until I was 16. I did the first year of O levels: maths, English lit and English language were compulsory, and then I did history, geography and biology – the six O levels. I was pleased with that.

RON BURTENSHAW was convinced that he would be sent to one of the new secondary modern schools.

The scholarship exams for the Brighton Grammar School and Varndean Secondary School came and went.

I knew from the start I had failed, all English and maths, what chance did I have?

Then there was the exam for the Building & Engineering Technical School. This was a different form of exam; it was an I.Q. test, none of the three R’s that I was expecting…I thoroughly enjoyed sitting the exam,

finishing well before time. All we had to do was wait for the results. The first two results came through, and as expected, I failed miserably. The days passed and I never heard the result of the third exam, so I took it that I had flopped on that one as well.

Miss Edghill, the headmistress, called me to my classroom where she was going to make an announcement. I had passed the scholarship for the building school.This was quite an achievement as only 32 boys from the whole of the education area were chosen for this school each year. My mother was so proud of me, everybody in the street was told.

The school RON BURTENSHAW was about to go to was the same school that PATRICK GEORGE and Ron’s own father had attended in the 1930s. Housed in a large Victorian building, it was originally known as Hanover Terrace School. By the end of World War II the name had changed to Brighton Junior Technical School for Building and by 1955 when RON was a pupil it had been renamed Brighton County Secondary School for Building and Engineering.

We would spend half the week doing academic studies and the rest of the week doing trade studies in plumbing, woodwork, painting and decorating, and brickwork. As we were 32 pupils to the form, we were split into teams of eight to work in the respective trades.

After the third year we were expected to have some idea of our final vocation, we would study either building or engineering.

A considerable number of boys came from the outlying districts, Hove and Portslade; some even came from out of Brighton, Hayward’s Heath, Burgess Hill, Hassocks. Cycle racks were provided for those that preferred that form of transport. The boys from out of town were provided with season tickets for the railway.

In the plumbing workshop we were taught to work in various materials: sheet lead, tin and aluminium; lead and copper pipe work, bending and soldering. We were able to make flashings around chimneys and even plumb a bathroom. In the paint shop we could prepare

> Page 167

Knock on Any Door > Education

Brighton Unemployed Centre Families Project the Crèche 2012 / Chloe Howley

> Page 169

and paint to a fine finish (without a spray gun), sign writing and heraldry. In woodworking, we understood the structures of differing types of wood, all manner of joints and turnings. In the brickwork shop we learned the skills of mixing mortars, laying bricks to various bonds, decorative garden walls and arches.

History was not the usual 1066 and all that.

We learned of the social and economic histories: the peasants’ revolt, serfdom, the industrial revolution, history of architecture. When our change of specialised subjects occurred at the age of 14, we went on to other historical events, such as James Watt steam engines, George Stephenson and so. Geography, as well as knowing where the countries were, we also studied the economics, material sources and wealth of nations, none of which could be deemed boring.

It was a relief for PAUL DOYLE when he left school at 15.

That was a red letter day for me. I didn’t like school. Who does? I was good at art, I still am, but I didn’t learn at school: that can’t be taught, that’s inbred.

I was drawing on the pavement when I was nine or ten (in Moulsecoomb). It’s a natural instinct which can’t be taught. Street art was rather frowned on back then. But I think they must have been good, nobody objected to them, they were even commentated on years later.

BERYL TUCKNOTT remembers that Richmond Street Infants School was used for a range of after school activities including the Nautical Training Corps, a voluntary organisation that started in Tarner and grew into a national organisation.

It was started on 1944 by Commodore Frank Froëst-Carr who was a truant officer (school board man). He realised that there were many boys in the town who had no fathers at home – they were mainly in the services serving their country or had perhaps been killed or injured in action. The boys needed help.

Knock on Any Door > Education

Skipper, as he was called, made enquiries about starting a maritime – based boys group. An ex-navy man himself, he knew what he could teach them. He persuaded the corporation to let him use the basement of Richmond Street Infants School. After decorating and fitting out the area as the inside of a ship, he was ready to start. Boys were recruited at first – girls were accepted later – from all over the town and beyond. Other adults offered to help as officers, mainly ex-servicemen and women.

Naval style uniforms and equipment were obtained. Also instruments for a marching band for Sunday church parade. He would lead them out of school in his naval uniform with his bulldog mascot. As we lived just opposite the school, Mum, Dad and I would hear the drums start beating and we would stand and watch them march off. Very smart they were too.

The cadets were aged eight to 18 years old and were taught all things nautical plus discipline and comradeship. It proved very popular and four more ships were eventually established in Brighton:TS Valiant in Woodingdean, TS Fearless in Mouslecoomb, TS Zealous in Patcham and TS Adventure in Hove. The Corps then spread throughout Sussex, Kent, Hampshire, Essex, London and beyond.

On Father’s Day every year thousands of cadets would descend on Withdean Stadium from all over the country for Founder’s Day. Dignitaries would attend including the Duke and Duchess of Norfolk, the Mayor and Mayoress of Brighton and, of course, the Skipper.

The NTC was an BURTENSHAW’S life.

important

part

of

RON

I began to pal up with a fellow student at school who was constantly drumming with his pencils on the desks; full drum rolls and taps and it transpired that he was a Navy Cadet and lead drummer in a band.This really interested me, so it was not long before I was joining the Nautical Training Corps, and it was not long before I was in the band as well; unfortunately not as a drummer, but I did learn to play the trumpet. The headquarters of

the NTC was in the basement of a junior school at the bottom of Richmond Street, just a short walk downhill from where I lived. The headquarters was named TS Nautilus although it was land-based.

Every year on the nearest Sunday to the 11th of November we would take part in the Remembrance Service at the war memorial in Old Steine. I was very proud to stand for the two minutes silence, wearing my father’s medals, waiting for the Last Post to be played, then the Reveille. It always brought a lump in my throat when I tried to remember the father that I never had. I left the NTC when I left school, as I could never get back to Brighton in time for parade. It was a sad day when I returned my uniform.

BERYL TUCKNOTT had to adjust to grammar school life.

When I went to Varndean and saw all those acres of playing fields, you know – from a backyard – and that’s when they realised I was short-sighted and I also had double-vision. I had to have an operation for that.

I was no good at ball games, except netball, because they’d take my glasses away from me and I couldn’t see the ball…the same with high jump, I couldn’t see the damn rope until I got up to it.

There was a path from Varndean Girl’s School and Varndean Boy’s School... It was very strict and we had a very snobby headmistress, you weren’t allowed to mix with the boys but, of course, we used to be conveniently sat by the path as the boys went up and down and they used to wait for us when we’d done cookery – we must have been very good cooks because we’d never get any cookery home, they’d eat it all on the way home.

My friend Pat, in St George’s Road, she met a boy through that and they eventually got married, he played for Brighton and Hove Albion.

PAUL DOYLE spent three of his teenage years in a youth detention centre. An experimental juvenile prison was set up in the village of Borstal, near Rochester, Kent in 1902 with the aim of separating youths from adults in

prison. The first of its kind, the word Borstal came to mean all detention centres for young people. Much has been written about the experiences of life in a borstal.

Here is a short insight into Paul’s experiences.

I got in trouble with the police, and I was sent to Borstal when I was about 17…if you think for yourself then you’re not a prisoner: you can be in prison and be free, in your mind, so it had no effect on me.

Paul recalls how there was little opportunity to paint in Borstal…

They gave me a chance to sew mail bags – that was rather small-minded of them, wasn’t it? I’ve always had this urge, this dream rather, to paint, it’s always been there, so it was no different when I was in Borstal really. And you retain your dream while you’re banged up…

I come out when I was 20. I was just so pleased to see Brighton, my first glimpse of Brighton through the train window was magical, I’d never felt anything like it.

You had the probation when you come out of Borstal, so for the remainder of your sentence, for however long you had to go, you were on probation for that period… and the officer just keeps an eye on you, he tries to find you work, he found me a job up Lewes Iron Foundry, so he was very helpful. Then I met my wife and got married and that put me on the straight and narrow. What the authorities regarded, what my probation officer regarded as a normal life, settling down, you know.

Barriers to education come in many forms. PAMELA SIMPSON tried to juggle work with being a single mother while living in her parents’ house in Sussex Street. It meant that an Open University course proved too much.

I tried to do a degree but I was living with my parents and my father used to get very irritated if I was watching the television because they used to have some of the lectures on the television. If it was at lunch time and they were going to dish up the dinner he would be

> Page 171

Sue Solly Donated School Photo Beryl Tucknott / St Johns ambulance Cadets meeting at Richmond Street School

Knock on Any Door > Education

very cross that I was watching. It just didn’t work. It was so stressful.

It was ever so cheap in those days… I was doing the mixed course, the humanities, you know with art and literature and that sort of thing, it was very interesting, but it didn’t work. I think if I’d been on my own I would have enjoyed it, but there were too many pressures going on all around me really; because I wasn’t very good at dealing with what happened to me you see…I mean, I’d known women who had been in the same position who’d made a much better job of it, you know…but as it so happens, my daughter did very well and especially my son. Something in the genes was alright obviously.

boys playing football and you just got a sense of the sensibility of the playground.

There were some real problem kids when our son started, and we were obviously worried that he would be influenced but he’s learnt to read and write and become very nice.

I don’t think he’s suffered at all from the school, in fact socially he’s probably benefited. And now I think the makeup of the school is quite broad; it’s always been a really lovely sweet school.

SEAN DE PODESTA is bringing up his family in Tarner today and schools are an important consideration.

We were quite committed – if it was not going to be really horrible – to send our kids to the local school. I suppose because we believe in the idea of comprehensive education. I know there’s the estate and quite a high percentage of people with problems in Tarner, and it’s really interesting how people…never meet a certain class of person unless you’re their teacher, their doctor, their social worker, so you’re always doing unto them…whereas, if you’re sending your kids to the same school you’ve got a common interest. So you’re doing things not for them, you are part of and involved in things that make a difference to you.

If you never have any experience of involving people you just get frightened, you read the paper, you think people are all scroungers, doing drugs, hanging round with hoods to frighten old ladies and this sort of thing. Whereas if you’re saying hi to their kids or you’re helping with a summer fete at school, you’ve got a common interest with them to make the school good, and that’s really important to us.

When we tried to choose a school we’d go to the summer fetes and winter fairs and you’d just get the vibe. I can remember going through pushing a pram and a boy just playing football said, ‘Stop, pram coming through’, and that was just really nice. This was just the

> Page 173

HOLIDAYS, HOP-PICKING & HIGH COCKALORUM

FRED RICHARDSON recalls the games played with cigarette cards.

HOLIDAYS, HOP-PICKING & HIGH COCKALORUM “…they used to give you a sixpence to stand on the corner and tell them when the police were coming…”

Josie Knowelden

High Cockalorum is a game like leapfrog except the players try to stay on the backs of other boys. Many growing up in the 1920s and 30s had no toys except the ones they found for themselves.

The men with their cigarette packets always had a tab card, a cigarette card, and we used to save these and if we got a double, which you often got, we used to play cards and stick them on the wall and knock them down and so on, that was our game. Or we used to play at ‘coloured alleys up the gutter’ and if you knocked one down you won that way.

We never had no money, of a night there’d be four or five of the boys, we used to play High Cockalorum – two teams and you’d jump on each back and make them collapse. We used to come home smothered in blood, really rough. We used to really go.

JOHN STEVENS remembers improvising fun and games on the Tarner Estate.

When the war came along we used to play cricket in the street using the waste bin as the wicket.

We had a bat and a tennis ball and we used to play ‘Over the garden six and out’, so if you hit the ball and it went in somebody’s garden you got six runs and you were out, and that was it.They usually came to our father when we broke windows… there was no end of trouble doing things like that.

I used to play a game called High Cockalorum: someone would lean against the fence and the wall and put up a back (bend over), and then someone would be behind them, leaning down, and you all had to run and see how many you could get on them backs, and if you all got on there, then you’d call out High Cockalorum, one-two-three. It depended on the first person how far they got up the thing.

MALCOLM KEEPING was a keen collector of Meccano as a boy.

It was very difficult to get hold of: I remember my father going around evenings after he left work to any second-hand shops to find out if they’ve got any

Knock on Any Door > Holiday, Hop-picking & High Cockalorum

Meccano. Somebody told him about a shop in Baker Street, off London Road… he went down there one night and found they’d got two or three boxes of secondhand Meccano, which he bought, which was like a goldmine. So I had an extra load of Meccano. I used to build lorries and buses and that type of thing; always vehicles.

You can still feel the pleasure young PATRICK GEORGE took in being near horses. Later Bert Payne was to give Patrick his first opportunity to earn some money.

Bert Payne who was almost opposite us (on Richmond Hill) and he had one horse. One of the nicest things in the world was to hear him getting his horse and cart out. I used to go out and watch a lot. He used to let me help sometimes, ‘Just hold this, hold that’, nothing particular, but it really made a very good part to the day for a kid because there weren’t many interests to hold you as a kid for entertainment. Everything you did as a child you had to make your own fun.

My brother Arthur used to go with Bert Payne on the horse and load the cart with all the groceries – they did greengroceries – and then go off. They used to ride that all the way over to Kemp Town because they had all their customers in Kemp Town and I used to love to watch them off.

They used to let me sit on it sometimes, hang on actually, because there wasn’t a lot of room on the cart itself, just to the bottom of the street. When they come home, you could hear them from Mighell Street, they’d come up, and directly they’d left Mighell Street and started turning into Richmond Hill, you’d hear the clatter of the horse coming up – that would make my day that would. So I’d go down there and chase them up till they got to the stables and Bert used to let me help to unload and unrig the horse. He’d take it into the stable and we’d clean up everything.

The Level and street games of football offered more to RON JEWELL than the beach ever did.

Patricia George and Brother on Brighton Beach

> Page 177

Pub Life / Tarner / Carlton Hill / Donated By John Stevens

I’m not a swimmer. I’ve never tried to swim all my life, and I’ve lived here all my life. …I know what it’s all about. We used to go down to the seafront, my brother used to go fishing but I’m not a fishing man – I don’t like the idea of taking the poor fish off the hook.

I’m an animal lover.

I was a footballer before the war. I was in the Albion: I won the first Albion Juniors… I was in there with Tim McCoy who went on to play for Portsmouth.

He was a smashing footballer. I met up with him again about 50 years afterwards, he came with the bowling club, ‘Crikey,’ he said, ‘You haven’t altered.’

We used to have boots with tough toe-caps, some of them were steel. If you were going to kick someone with one of those you knew you got kicked.

All the boys used to play football. We’d go over the Level – only one small piece of grass it was, all the rest was gravel – and play football; or in the streets and get chased by the police. We used to have an old football, filled with card paper because we couldn’t afford to buy a new one, and we used to kick it about and they used to come up, one from each hill, to catch us.

We used to play football matches, streets used to get a team and play another team and we’d put the coats down on the Level.

The street was a place of endless amusement for EILEEN JONES and her friends.

The lamp post had a post sticking from the top of it and we used to put ropes up there and make swings from the lamppost. We would play football and all sorts of games in the streets… being a cul-de-sac we could put two at the end of the road to watch for the policemen in twos walking quite frequently in Edward Street, so we would stop and not get caught.

We could watch the smithy, because there was a blacksmith’s shop there. We’d watch very, very silently and we would have to be really good… a great big man he was, he would allow us to stay around and watch the horses being shod, that was a big treat.

JOSIE KNOWELDEN recalls that there was a chance of earning a little money when the men played their own street games. Until 1961 the only legal form of betting was on race courses.

The men used to play ‘up the mop’ – and that was illegal so they used to give you a sixpence to stand on the corner and tell them when the police were coming…it’s a gambling game really.You stand away from the wall and you throw your money, and at the end, let’s say there’s six of you, and the nearest one to get to the end of the wall, collects all the money.

There used to be runners to take bets and all that. My dad used to take bets…we used to sit on there and say ‘the police are coming.’ The police station was down by the seafront then. All the kids used to run from the police, they were allowed to clip you round the earhole then, so I wasn’t going to stop and find that out.

Street games were still popular after the war as RON BURTENSHAW remembers.

Boys often joined in girls’ games, but a number of boys would have their own entertainment. Marbles were often known as alleys. The glass marble would be rolled down the road gutter and if it hit your opponent’s marble it was claimed as yours. Quite a lot of marbles could be gained on one day, and lost the following day.

‘Cards against the wall’ was another game where cigarette cards were flicked against a wall, usually with two fingers, from a standing position of the middle of the road. If your card happened to land on another it was claimed as yours; again collections were won or lost. After this type of game would be a quiet period of swaps, where duplicate cards could be swapped for others of a different type.

Cowboys and Indians was another favourite, usually with the girls as the Indians. I remember one day we captured an Indian and tied her up to the lamppost.

Our mothers called us all in for lunch, so we left the poor girl tied to the post. I don’t think she played that game with us after that.

> Page 179

Girls would usually play ‘Whip and Top’, spinning a conical wooden top and whipping it to keep it going.

Wooden hoops were used for many things, before the hula hoop was invented. Skipping, either individually or in pairs, high speed called dubs, crossovers etc. Sometimes the girls would acquire long lengths of rope (usually Mum’s washing line) and three or four girls would skip in a line.The girls that tripped over the line were out of the game, so the last one standing was the winner.

‘Hopscotch’ was another pastime. The pitch was often chalked on the pavements in numbered squares.

A piece of slate was thrown to a numbered slab and the participant would hop and skip to the designated number. I think that was how it was played. Disaster would strike when Mrs Brown from No.28 would leave her house with a bucket of soapy water and yard broom to wash away the chalked pitch, much to the annoyance of the children.

The seafront was always a place of fun and entertainment.

PATRICIA GEORGE and her brother enjoyed games on the beach and visits to the Hall of Mirrors before the war. It was also a chance for Patricia’s mother to display her swimming skills.

My mother swam from pier to pier when she was young, and we said ‘Don’t Mum, don’t do it’, and of course my father said ‘No, Mave, don’t do it’, and she’d go into the water – because she was a beautiful swimmer – and then she’d start from the Palace Pier to the West Pier…then my brother tried to do it, but he couldn’t do it. Mind you, she was a big woman, a strong woman.

PATRICK GEORGE is nostalgic for goat rides.

In front of the Palace Pier, along the curb, there were the goats and there was a little truck, and you used to have a ride in it and the goats would pull you out all over to Hove.

Knock on Any Door > Holiday, Hop-picking & High Cockalorum

Before the war RENE ANSELL lived in Southampton and would holiday in Brighton every year. The Hatton brothers – Jimmy and Chris – were private operators who provided services on a section of the beach.

We had six weeks of sun – we had proper seasons then – on the beach every day. The weather was beautiful, it was lovely all round by the Palace Pier and everywhere… mostly we went a lot to the West Pier because you had bathing huts there on the righthand side. The beach was called Jimmy Hatton’s Beach and you paid to go in the bathing hut. And of course you had all cork matting going down the seafront where you could walk, instead of on the pebbles; but if you put that down now it would probably get stolen.

FRED RICHARDSON also has happy – but different – memories of the pier, ones that involved singing for the family’s supper and fighting to keep hold of hard-won pennies.

We used to sing under the Palace Pier when we was happyjacking. My mum said, ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do today’ and she’d go under the pier singing and they used to throw the pennies over the top. Plenty of blood was shed then. Then all of a sudden there’d be a scream, the police would arrive on the scene and you’d have nowhere to go – only into the water. So when I was seven or eight I was swimming like a fish. Sink or swim.

It was a fortune – sometimes I’d be lucky and come with sixpence or ninepence. You could buy anything with ninepence – a large loaf of bread was only two penny, half a pound of sugar would be about a penny, a pint of milk would be a penny, so you can imagine ninepence would go a long way.

A penny in the gas so you got a light, or you could use the cooker. I never thought of buying sweets, I’d take everything home to Mum. I wouldn’t dream of it. Even my wages, even up to 16 years of age, I used to take my wages and give them to my mum. And she’d give you what she thought.

RENE WOOLGAR only remembers one dark cloud in a childhood of long summers.

SMITH was a schoolboy when a macabre discovery was made in Cavendish Street.

In the school holidays we were on the beach or up the park. And you never saw bad weather, you could go out in your ankle socks and plimsolls, and you never got the rain in the summer.

I was on the beach one day and it’s crowded, the beach really was packed and everyone chatting away like and all of a sudden it went dead quiet, and I thought it was a big black cloud what come over – it wasn’t. It was a zeppelin, it was enormous, it really was big. It might have been the R101 or the R102… the Germans called them zeppelins but we called them airships here.

I was only a child and I was frightened; you never heard it coming because of all the noise, but this big black cloud and everyone went dead quiet.

I remember one day a body had been thrown over the wall from Cavendish Street, a woman murdered, and we were all down there as kids. There were crowds, and one of the boys from school – we all had fountain pens then not biros – and he was down there with a red fountain pen dropping little bits…he said, ‘Oooh, this’ll give them a clue,’ he said, ‘they’ll think it’s blood.’ They never did find who did the murder.

And then they had the trunk crimes, two trunk crimes in Brighton. Once they found part of a body in a trunk at Brighton Station, it was put in the left luggage and the porters noticed the smell. I don’t think they ever found the other parts of that one, and never found who did it.

And then this other one, the chap Tony Mancini, he killed his so-called girlfriend and put her in the trunk and he was wheeling her about in a barrow about Brighton.

It was quite a to-do at that time. I know we were frightened when we went out at night – ‘Is the murderer about?’ I do remember one boy I went to school with, unfortunately his brother got hung, he murdered her up the golf course in Brighton and he got hung. There were a few others got hung.

EILEEN JONES remembers being held up to a window to watch a zeppelin cross Brighton.

It was huge, high up in the sky, and sadly…that zeppelin exploded in the sky killing many people, burning them to death…

The R101 was a British airship completed in October 1929.After modification and some trial flights – perhaps over Brighton beach – the airship crashed in France on her maiden voyage overseas in October 1930, killing nearly all the 54 people on board.

However, RENE ANSELL now thinks what she saw might have been the Graf Zeppelin, a German airship that carried passengers and mail. It made nearly 600 commercial fights in the nine years it operated from 1928 to 1937. Most were from mainland Europe to South America, but there were also flights to London and other European capitals.

Children can take ghoulish delight in the strange. 1930s Brighton was notorious for violent crime and DENNIS

According to the archives of the Metropolitan Police the two trunk murders were not connected, but one led police to investigate the second. On the 17th June 1934 parts of a woman’s body were discovered in a trunk at Brighton Station. The next day a similar trunk was found at Kings Cross Station containing parts from the same body. The victim could not be identified but when the police heard that a 42-year-old dancer living in Brighton was missing they searched the lodgings of her boyfriend, Tony Mancini. They discovered a black trunk at 52 Kemp Street: inside was the body of Violet Kaye. Mancini was acquitted of murder and there was no evidence that he was connected to the first trunk murder. Forty years later in 1976 a Sunday newspaper reported that Mancini had admitted responsibility for Violet’s death.

> Page 181

In an essay on Brighton’s portrayal in film, Frank Gray notes that these notorious murders caught the public imagination and helped create Brighton’s disreputable reputation between the wars. Jokes were made about Brighton being The Queen of Slaughtering Places – a pun on the phrase The Queen of Watering Places. In reality crime statistics for Brighton in the 1930s were relatively moderate – only six murders took place in the 10-year period and many other offences were associated with gambling.

DENNIS SMITH loved the days when there was racing at Brighton Racecourse, even when there was a hint of menace in the air.

They used to unload the horses at the High Street and then walk them up Blaker Street up to the race hill. And after the races they used to bring them back down. We used to love watching them.

After school we all rushed up there and watched the last race or two. And then they used to bring them back down and this nice yard, at the back of the gardens in Cavendish Street in Dorset Gardens, was where they used to keep them overnight if it was a two or three day event.

I remember they used to have these razor gangs who used to go around the race tracks, get the money off the bookies, otherwise they’d get slashed. And there was one particular gang leader – I won’t mention names, but he was well known – used to come down to Brighton when the races were on and he had friends lived just down the road from us and we always used to be around in that area because he used to give to us kids all his loose change in his pockets.

Christmas could be a bitter reminder of poverty.There were no outings for FRED RICHARDSON and his brothers and sisters.

They always kept us indoors at Christmas time because we had no arse in our trousers to go out.

Knock on Any Door > Holiday, Hop-picking & High Cockalorum

And some years there wasn’t much in the way of presents as MOLLY GRACE remembers.

Do you know what I had for Christmas once? A stuffed sock with a piece of ribbon round the top half of it to make a head and that’s all my sister could do. Well, she couldn’t afford anything. So she stuffed her sock up and made like a little animal thing, a little head, and I used to take that everywhere, take it to bed, take it to school, and the teacher said, ‘What is that thing?’ I said ‘It’s my stuffed sock’, she said ‘I don’t want it in the classroom anymore, it’s got very filthy.’

JEAN COLLINS’ Christmas was all about the family getting together.

One of my dad’s brothers lived at the bottom of Pankhurst Avenue, they had nine children – they lost one – we used to all go up there Boxing Day. We used to go up to Gran’s on Quebec Street after tea on Christmas Day. In later years, on Christmas Day, when we were on Scotland Street, two of my dad’s brothers and their families used to come to tea; then on Boxing Day, some of Mum’s relatives came.

My auntie and uncle often came up from the Live and Let Live, but they couldn’t stay long, they closed for a little while on Boxing Day but then the girls – their daughters – used to stay and my dad used to see them down home later.

Christmas was a good time for MALCOLM KEEPING even when money was tight.

My father didn’t earn much money so I suppose Christmas time was a very difficult time for him. He used to go down the Charles Napier pub in Southover Street, on the corner of Southampton Street, and he would buy a bottle of orange wine, a bottle of raisin wine, and a bottle of ginger wine – it was always that, every Christmas, processed by Fryco’s Lemonade. Fry & Co Ltd. Then he’d buy perhaps one or two bottles of stout and a couple of bottles of light ale or brown ale.

Lorraine Beal and Auntie / Tilbury Place

And that was it, that was the staple diet for Christmas – apart from the Christmas puddings that Mum used to make. We had chicken, yes, before the days of turkey and stuff, that wasn’t on the menu at all.

There were other special days that linger in the memory. PATRICIA GEORGE recalls a street party that revealed very clearly what the local community felt about the Abdication crisis in 1936.

It was when Mrs Simpson and Prince Edward were going to get married. Where we lived they had all the decorations all across the road and they put a dummy up in the middle of the road, because no one was agreeing with this wedding, and they were throwing things at the dummy.

SHIRLEY TIDEY’S mother used to collect for regular community parties and her grandfather helped set up a street skipping competition every year.

At Easter my granddad used to bring this big thick rope up from the arches that they used to pull the boats up with. The women came out and skipped across it and the men as well.

On bank holiday Mondays JEAN COLLINS and her family visited an aunt who lived out near Wild Park at Moulsecoomb.

Dad used to take us out to the park and we used to take stuff to contribute towards the tea because none of them could afford to pay the extra rounds, you know. So that’s mainly what we did. And we used to get an outing once a year, go to Littlehampton or Hassocks or somewhere like that.

Life revolved around the Level in the autumn for RON BURTENSHAW when it returned to being open ground after the army Nissen huts were removed in 1955.

Each street in the area had their own bonfire built from scrap wood and mattresses. There was a bit of rivalry as to who could build the tallest bonfire but nobody robbed from them or ignited them. They were built all in the weeks leading to Bonfire Night. On the 5th November this area of Brighton was lit up, rockets were set off and a good time was had by all.

The days following the air stunk of smouldering mattresses and burnt embers.

And on May Day the girls danced…

BERYL TUCKNOTT also remembers skipping in the streets.

It started on Good Friday – I’ve never found out why – out came the skipping ropes on Good Friday.

We had individual ropes or long ones stretched across the street, singing ‘Salt, Mustard, Vinegar, Pepper’ while jumping in and out of the rope. We would also use the rope as a swing, hooking it over the lamppost; we had no gardens.

Knock on Any Door > Holiday, Hop-picking & High Cockalorum

The girls would tie lengths of Mum’s washing line to the lamp post on the corner of Richmond Street and dance around the makeshift maypole. This lamppost was used for many things in those days; it was one of those old fashioned ones, curved at the top from which a bulb and shade would hang.

EILEEN JONES and her family went on annual holidays.

There wasn’t a choice – it was a condition of her father’s live-in caretaker job at the public assistance office that the family home was empty for a fortnight every year.

We stayed in Tunbridge Wells, visiting the hop fields and beautiful walks in the country and I used to go down very early in the morning by the river and sit with my father while he was fishing. It was great. It was lovely this beautiful, silent, peaceful place.

Eileen also enjoyed Sunday School outings.

Just to go to Hassocks or Burgess Hill was the biggest treat of all on the train. The train was wonderful.

It’s hard to put into words – it was like going to another world. I mean we never got on buses, we walked everywhere…

When RON JEWELL returned from the war, he hung up his football boots and in one of the worst winters of the 20th century headed for ice.

I played ice hockey on Falmer Pond in 1947. It weren’t half hard, you went over with no padding. Ooh, with no padding. We played ice hockey at Queen’s Park, that was frozen solid.

For years – ’49, ’50, ’51 – we booked ice hockey tickets. We used to watch the Tigers, they were fantastic.

When the Regent opened in Queen’s Road in 1921 – now the site of Boots the Chemist – it was considered the most luxurious cinema in the country. It had a café and a separate restaurant with its own orchestra.

The dance hall on the roof was under an arched superstructure and was a hub of Brighton social life.

In 1948 the cinema could seat over 2,000 customers and tickets cost between 1s 9d and 4s 6d. In 1967 the ballroom became a bingo hall and in 1974 the building was demolished.

RON JEWELL was a regular.

You’d go to the cinema every night and you never got in, it was always full up. And you had to queue, and they’d come out and say ‘Two singles?’ And if you Party / Donated by John Stevens Street Party

> Page 185

St James’s Street and George Street 2011 / Chloe Howley

Knock on Any Door > Holiday, Hop-picking & High Cockalorum

were in the front of the queue you’d say, ‘Yeah, we’ll take them’ and then you’d meet up later on.

Saturday morning pictures were popular with children.

BERYL TUCKNOTT and her friends went to the Astoria in Gloucester Place. The cinema opened in 1933 with a tea room, restaurant and seating for 1,800. It became a bingo hall in the 1970s and has been boarded up since 1997. In January 2012 permission for the listed building to be demolished was granted and the site is due to be developed as office space with community meetings rooms.

Sixpence a time, and the organ appeared from the floor, on the stage. The film started, the noise was horrendous with the boys riding (their) horses on the back of the seats when the cowboy films were on. There was also a serial which continued each week.

JOHN STEVENS also went to the Astoria and remembers the games that were played afterwards When we saw Cowboy and Indian films, we (the younger ones) always had to be the dodgy ones, we always had to be the Indians. Our wigwam was made out of a Mackintosh coat with a top button done up and … it was wrapped round the four sticks. I remember the older boys used to have the bigger tents and they used to be in there kissing the girls. I must have been about eight or nine. The older boys were about 12, 13, 14 around about that age.

Children could be harsh critics recalls PATRICK GEORGE. At the top of North Road there was the Grand, and there was another building that used to do a paste of pease pudding and faggots. They’d go in and buy this and take it into the cinema. If it was a bad film they’d throw it about. If they wanted to express their disrespect

they’d come round and take it out on the shop, put the paste on all the windows. Either they got entertainment at the film or they made their own.

Pease pudding hot!

Pease pudding cold!

Pease pudding in the pot Nine days old.

The basic ingredients for pease pudding are dried split peas, soaked, an onion and water. Faggots were traditionally made from the cheapest offal such as lights (lungs) mixed with bread and onions.

RON BURTENSHAW visited many cinemas and some film fans didn’t always need money.

Saturday morning pictures if I had earned any pennies would be at the Astoria in Grand Parade, or the Odeon in Kemp Town. Later, when I was growing up, providing I had earned some cash, I would often spend the odd hour in the Prince’s News Theatre in North Street to see the funnies after spending the morning in the reference library. Later, I would frequent the Paris News Theatre in New Road, or the Continental in Kemp Town, to watch foreign films...

With very limited budgets I would often go to the low-priced cinemas such as the Gaiety or Arcadia in Lewes Road or the Duke of York at Preston Circus.

I think I will always remember the Arcadia. A deprived kid would pay for his entrance, and when the lights went down he would run to the side door and open it for all the other kids who were waiting outside.

As a young boy RON JEWELL found other free entertainment.

When the circus came to town, I used to find out where they were and used to get down there quick.

You could walk with two horses from the stables to the

> Page 187

Hippodrome, and the show used to be in St James’s Street. We used to do that for nothing.

Dancing was also popular for the grown ups and the nearly grown up. Sherry’s in West Street dominated Brighton’s pre-war night-life and RON JEWELL felt it was somewhere you had to watch yourself. In 1949 it was converted back into a roller-skating rink and then became the Ritz amusement arcade in the 1960s.

Dinner dances at Sherry’s – you could get into a bit of trouble at Sherry’s, it was one of those places where the wide boys used to go, the nasty ones, used to think they were better than everyone else and you used to get into one or two scuffles down there.

PATRICK GEORGE and his wife PATRICIA were prize winning dancers for one night.

Where the Clocktower is, on the big corner opposite, there’s a bookshop now – Waterstone’s. Well, over the top of that was a dance hall.

It used to be one and ninepence, or two shillings on a Saturday or Sunday night. It was a lot but the point is you knew that that was an evening’s entertainment.

We went down there dancing one night and we were all doing our jiving and we put our names down and went into the competition. There were 12 of us in it, and we won.

Do you know what the prize was? Soap.

And Patricia got a face cream and it was solid as a rock. We worked hard for that too, we knocked them out one by one, I had visions of a nice big cup.

Weekends – you couldn’t do it during the week – just Fridays, Saturdays. It’s a shame really because there were so many dance halls in Brighton. The Bomb on West Street was very big, very posh when it started off but it gradually came down a bit.

Patrick also remembers dancing in the summer on Palace Pier.

Knock on Any Door > Holiday, Hop-picking & High Cockalorum

Where you’ve got the fair now, that was the dance hall. They had a band there and in the summer you’d get a nice night, nice calm sea, moonlight.

We were a couple of real get-about dancers we were… jiving, jitterbugging, I had her up over my shoulders, under my legs.

JOSIE KNOWELDEN met her husband in the Regent ballroom. They married in 1955.

I was about 17 when I met him. I got married in an ordinary dress – a pleated one, flower blue – I know my wedding ring cost seven and six.

Home entertainment was also popular. DENNIS SMITH remembers the twice weekly card games with affection.

The men used to come and play cards. They played snap and drag and rummy and solo. We learnt as kids all the games. And this went on for many, many years, even after I was married, we used to all go Wednesday evening and a Sunday evening. All the kids used to come down and my younger brother and my older brother and my father and one or two friends used to come in and we used to play cards. And then if there was enough to make up the card game, when we were younger, we used to sing and attempt to jive. It was really lively.

There was music and entertainment in RON JEWELL’S home too.

When I was young we never had a radio, we used to have an old phonograph. The records were cylinders, they weren’t flat and they always used to say ‘This is so and so’s record’ before they started. When we were all working, we had a radio built with the old accumulators and all that.

Day Out / The London Arms/ Donated By John Stevens

MALCOLM KEEPING remembers provided the only entertainment.

when

radio

We used to listen to the radio every night.There were three BBC radio stations: Light Programme was normal entertainment, Home Service was a little bit more politics and that type of thing and the Third Programme which was a lot of classical music. Of course if you’d like to tune down the dial you could most probably in the evening pick up 208. It was Radio Luxembourg which was a commercial station so it used to have adverts on it which at that time was quite a novelty and that was transmitted from Luxembourg. I had my first television about 1956.

The BBC only began to transmit a regular television service three years before the war started, limited to a small area around London. The service was suspended in September 1939 and resumed in June 1946. RON JEWELL’S television was probably one of the first in his street.

I bought my first television with my gratuity from the army. It was nine inch Pye. It cost me 47 quid and it cost 15 quid to have an aerial put on the roof. When people next door put their stuff on you used to get all the lines crossed and if an aeroplane went over the picture used to go smaller and bigger.

After the war FRED RICHARDSON enjoyed life and had one of the first televisions in Whitehawk.

I was getting something like 12, 14 quid a week, which was a lot of money – a neighbour would be lucky to get two quid. I had the pre-fab and done it all up. I had an enormous (television) mast at the back and I can remember the first tune coming over, Leo Fould and ‘My Song Goes Round the World’, that was the first thing that come on television.

Knock on Any Door > Holiday, Hop-picking & High Cockalorum

CLIFF RAYMON spent his working life in the cinema so it’s not surprising that he had the ability to run his own film shows at home.

Before television I used to have my own cinema with screens and projectors. My wife’s sisters used to come round and watch, we used to put on a nice show, it was cheaper than going to the cinema. I used to hire the films. I had my own projectors – films 16mm, 8mm, you name it.

MOLLY GRACE’S mother set a curfew to keep her family in order.

She used to say to my brother Victor – we all burst out laughing – she said, ‘Victor, everybody’s got to be in this house at ten o’ clock. No good comes after ten.’ He said, ‘Mother, you can do what you like two in a bed. You don’t have to wait for a certain time.’

I was about 16 or 17, I wanted to go out with Bettie Mears…my cousin, so my eldest sister she said: ‘We’ll drag the dustbin along to the back yard window, we leave the top little window open so you can put your hand through the top window, open it and get in the sink.’

Well, I was about ten minutes late so I thought: my mother’s going to flay me. So I got in the sink and it was full of washing up, and the noise… my mother come flying through, still with her nightshirt on: ‘Where the hell have you been?’

I was standing there like that, wet-through: ‘Oh my cups!’ That’s all she kept saying; and my brother said, ‘Well, we’ll have to drink out of jam jars.’ Anyway, she did get some cups… It was funny but it wasn’t funny.

My eldest sister used to go out with a chap called Tom Bailey, and their courting used to be round the back of the church. So my mother used to say to my brother Victor, ‘Try and rescue your sister...

And she used to come rushing in – ‘Mum, do you know how old I am? I’m over 30 years old and you’re telling me that I can’t go round the back of the church with my boyfriend?’ She said, ‘Well I don’t want him in here, he’s got ginger hair’ – she had a thing about ginger

men. Oh we used to laugh, we did laugh a lot really, it was so funny.

BERYL TUCKNOTT and her family found that there were some real advantages to being shopkeepers.

We used to advertise for the theatres and the cinemas so we never paid to go. We used to go to the Theatre Royal so much, I loved it – I still do – we had passes.

I learnt to skate. I used to go roller-skating, cycling, they bought me a bike when I was 13, a reconditioned one.We cycled everywhere: we used to go to Newtimber primrosing, blackberrying up at the Chattri (the South Downs monument dedicated to the Indian soldiers who fought in World War I).

We were great ice hockey fans. I’ve got their autographs. Every season my mum would go down and book the same three seats next to the supporters’ stand, second row up, and Mum and Dad and I would be down there every Thursday – we didn’t get those tickets free, it was only for the general public skating. Oh it was wonderful. Never any trouble, never any fighting, only on the rink during the game – gloves off… It was such a massive draw for Brighton: like you see the Albion now, you’d see masses of people going towards West Street and of course they pulled it down in the 60s, they promised us another one but we’re still waiting…

For many, hop-picking in Kent was the only holiday they knew. Every August the streets of Tarner would go quiet, says RON BURTENSHAW. Lorries would load up with mattresses, beds, boxes and different bits of furniture. The children would pile onto the backs of the lorries, often with older relatives. For the people in these slum conditions, this was a way to earn extra money. Also, to give the children a holiday in the countryside and fresh air.

Landlord & Landlady at The London Arms, Fred and Rose Stevens Shirley Tidey’s Parents Darts / Home of Interviewees / 2011 / Chloe Howley

> Page 191

In the chapter on War, MOLLY GRACE describes hop-picking as the Battle of Britain is fought in the skies above their heads, but here she describes what peacetime Kent was like.

Lots of families in the Brighton area went. We used to have an old lorry come down that was sent by the farmer and you had to take your bedding and some food that kept well, old tin trunks with the blankets in, and a hopping pot, especially old black pots that you could link over a thing over the fire and boil it…

And we all loved it because it was all lovely fields around and fruit-picking and everything, it was lovely.

It was like a good holiday, we never thought of work, because we were all used to that sort of thing.You could have a sub: that means if you picked a lot of hops, say like we earned thirty bob today, so on the Friday she’d tell the farmer that she wanted some of her money, he’d make a note that she’d had money, so she didn’t get as much at the end, so we could go down out through the little cottages and go in the little shops – because they had proper little shops – and we’d buy what we wanted food-wise.

EILEEN JONES never went hopping herself but when she went to Kent every summer she loved to meet up with the families and young people who were working in the hop fields.

I used to sit sometimes with the family that were there and go out and pick the hops. The children would (have) an umbrella turned up, and they had to fill that umbrella full of hops twice and then they could go and play.

They had huts that they stayed in and evidently there was a competition amongst all the people in the hop fields who would get it most homely and they would get a prize. Yeah, it was great, it truly was.

Holidays away from home that didn’t involve hard work were rare, as RON JEWELL remembers.

Hops Butlins Certificate / Won by Patrick & Patricia George’s Daughter on holiday

Knock on Any Door > Holiday, Hop-picking & High Cockalorum

We went over to Jersey just after the war and it was an eye-opener because the Germans had been there. That’s about the only holidays we ever had, we only used to get one week a year in those days. And when I was engineering, one week a year with no pay; you got no pay for Easter, Whitsun, Christmas.

off duty police. It has been suggested that the name described the language of regulars or that it was the best place to sell stolen lead – blueys. It could simply be because it once had blue tiles or was painted blue.

Pub life was important in Tarner in the days when it seemed as if there was one on every corner. For some it was their only taste of relaxation, their only chance to let off steam, for others it was the centre of the community. As a small independent business it was also a way of making a living and housing the family.

The fights were horrific. The people used to stand on the Saturday night to watch the men come out and punch the lights out of each other – and there was always a fight on a Saturday night. Well the police come up but they didn’t do anything they’d just say ‘Oh, bugger off home.’

PATRICK GEORGE has clear memories of what Tarner pubs used to be like. .

JOSIE KNOWELDEN also remembers the Blue House.

Sundays were famous for fighting: you worked right to the weekend, and you finished up with Sunday as the only day for the men, and the pub was the only way they could amuse themselves.

They didn’t have football like they have now, or anything. I mean now you sit down and you’ve got so much entertainment. So they went up the pub to have a few drinks, and you’d get some stupid berk who’d had one too many, just come out with one remark, and normally it was just something you’d take as a joke, but the other person who it applied to maybe had had too many and that was it and fights started. Once two started it went everywhere, everybody started because it was ‘Here, leave him alone, he’s my brother’; and then next thing the police used to come up. They never used to take them in unless it was really, really bad, they got so used to it.

The Blue House – real name the Lion and Unicorn – was on the corner of John Street, Sussex Street and Ashton Rise and was recently converted into flats. A number of suggestions have been put forward about its nickname: some believe it was located near a blue line tram stop, others that it was a favourite place for

MOLLY GRACE remembers when the last thing you could have at the Blue House was a quiet drink.

All our dads used to use it, and it wasn’t a Saturday night if there wasn’t a fight in there. That had a big air-raid shelter in the bar when we were kids, we used to go in there and hide there while our mums and dads were having a drink, in case there was an air raid.

Another pub in the area experienced difficulties because of its name, MOLLY GRACE remembers.

There was a big pub, called the Italian Arms, and they were told to bring that sign down because we were at war with Germany and Italy at the time, and it mustn’t be called the ‘Italian’ Arms – so they had to put another name on the pub and that was right across from the school.

JOHN STEVENS’ parents ran a pub at the top of Lennox Street, the London Arms, now demolished.

I used to go into the pub but I never used to serve in there, I hated serving in there. I used to help them put the barrels up, because they were drawing from the wood. It was only a little beer house because you had the Miller’s Arms on the corner of Windmill Street, and you had wines and spirits over there, but this

> Page 193

was just a little beer house, and all it had was a little snug and a little private bar – no saloon bar or anything – but you had a little room downstairs where they had a piano if it was any celebration that week.

SHIRLEY TIDEY was 11 when her mother Rose took over the London Arms.

My mum was the landlady and my dad and my brother lived there but I still stayed in Tarner Road with my grandad. My dad was in scaffolding, he used to go to work and my mum looked after the pub. When my dad got home at night he used to have his dinner, wash and change and then up to the pub: and then in the morning same old thing, up and out to work. When my brother went in the army I stayed in the pub and I was there until I got married in 1956.Then when they pulled Mum’s pub down – there’s flats there now – she moved up to the Royal Exchange (now The Pub With No Name) at the top of Southover Street.

My mum used to sell crabs and whelks on the counter and jellied eels. She used to cook them and she used to say: ‘Watch them don’t boil over.’ So I had to watch them and take them out of their shells, course as I was taking them out I was eating them and they were all warm and lovely. My Mum used to make really big bread puddings and she used to get a big block of ice-cream.

She didn’t charge for them and sometimes she used to bake potatoes in their jackets.

JEAN COLLINS’ Uncle Fred was the landlord of the Live and Let Live pub on the north east corner of Dinapore Street and Richmond Street.

They were there for about 50 years, because his father had it before him and then they were coming up to their 50th wedding anniversary when he retired – that’s when it was all pulled down. His name was Hatton and he was my mum’s sister’s husband.

We always had music in our lives because Uncle Fred was quite a good pianist. He never had a music

Knock on Any Door > Holiday, Hop-picking & High Cockalorum

lesson in his life and he couldn’t read music but he could play anything. We used to love it if we were down there, we weren’t allowed to go in the pub but we used to open the door. There used to be two ladies, Mrs Moon and Mrs Hubbard, they also used to drink their milk stouts and I can see them now, there was a little seat that took two. They used to say, ‘Go on Fred, give us a tune’, and we used to think that was hilarious as kids, because they’d obviously had too many milk stouts.

RON BURTENSHAW remembers precisely when the Montreal Arms in Albion Hill stopped being just a place to have a drink and started being the hub of community life for him.

I did not start drinking in pubs until I was 18 and then it was only a takeaway beer for me and an arrowroot biscuit for my dog. I was studying at this time.

Serious drinking did not start until I lost my sister in 1962 through an accident at work. My mother was very distraught and the odd hour in the pub was a relief to her. My own drinking carried on having met new friends, but in 1963 things changed.

On Boxing Day night I had taken my dog out for his late night walk in a complete blizzard. We were so covered in fine snow that at one stage I could not even see the dog, but followed him by his footprints in the snow. In the morning I was woken by my frantic mother, trying to explain that Ray over at 31 Windmill Street was in trouble. Leaving my front door, with the snow about four feet thick, I could see the problem. The overnight snow had drifted by the wind from Richmond Street and was up as high as the first floor windows. Poor old Ray had opened his front door to get his milk for an early cuppa, and in fell the snow, half way up his hallway.

Armed with a shovel I managed to dig Ray out of trouble. Many of the other street residents were digging to clear pathways. After shifting tons of snow between us we all fancied a pint in the local. Quite a few people from neighbouring Richmond Street and Albion Hill had the same idea. Paths were dug in one direction only – to the Montreal Arms. Can you imagine lines of deep

trenches dug in the snow from all directions, and all ending up at the pub? The pub became a community centre, everybody sat at tables chatting, exchanging yarns. Games of cards, darts, snooker and music, in fact nobody stood at the bar; everybody knew each other.

Even in the times of power failure we would sit huddled up against the fire in the grate, sharing a redhot poker to warm up our beer. It was a very cold winter which lasted up to Easter.

Windmill Street) was a normal pub, but they’ve changed it now so it’s more like a bar in terms of the beer and ambience.There was one time we’d go in there and they didn’t have any bitter.

Working in George Street, BARRY WINDHAM remembers when there was a definite Saturday sound coming from the pub across George Street.

The pub opposite used to have a snug and a public bar. They used to get quite a few of the holiday people in there and they would like to have a good drink – they used to say down there, start selling their singing beer – that used to be it – Saturday singing beer.

SEAN DE PODESTA sees the pubs of Tarner changing.

It’s so startling the class divide between Albion Hill and Southover Street in terms of pub culture. You know in Southover Street they’re really lively student pubs; you’d always trip up a social worker or teacher… more likely to be an IT person. It’s a very different vibe to Albion Hill, which I’d say is just much more working class basically.

One thing that I do is play bar billiards – this is the stuff of history because it’s probably going to disappear in the pubs of Tarner – at the Albion on Albion Hill. Now on Monday nights it’s very quiet, sometimes it can be just us, or maybe two other people, and I don’t like to see that really – I’m sure other nights it’s much busier but it does make you wonder about the economics of it. I’m sure the smoking ban probably hasn’t helped, and it’s actually more expensive to drink at a pub if you’re drinking just to get drunk.

So in the ten years that I’ve been here lots of pubs have closed. The Setting Sun (at the corner of

> Page 195

Knock on Any Door > Walk & Tour

THE TARNER WALK & TOUR TARNER WALK & TOUR POINTS 1.Tilbury Place 2. Tarner Home 3. Mighell Street 4. Church & Rectory 5. St John’s Place 6. Setting Sun & Windmill Street 7. Sussex Street & Tarner Estate 8. John Street 9. Flats & Towerblocks 10. Morley Street 11. Circus Street North Side 12. Circus Street South Side 13. Kingswood Street & Carlton Hill 14. White Street 15. Edward Street 16. George Street 17. St James’ Street

‘Narrow Streets and courts almost back to back ran at right angles from the steeply climbing Carlton Hill and Sussex Street.

Mostly built between 1810 and 1850 they had long exceeded their useful life and were responsible for the jibe that Brighton was the town with the Queen Anne front and Mary Ann back.’

The Regency Society In 2010 and 2011 Valerie Mainstone and Richard Ince led visitors on a tour of Tarner. Using our map and notes you can now experience the tour yourself and view a very ordinary urban landscape with new eyes.

Take your time to stop, keep still and imagine the smell of freshly smoked herring, the cries of winkle-picking Kelly, the rag and bone man or the white oil man selling a cure for everything. Imagine chiildren playing in the street, the clip clop of the passing horse and carts and the groans of the barrow boys as they made their way up the hills. Walk around Tarner and you can travel back in time.

1.Tilbury Place Your tour begins at the end of Tilbury Place. Built in the early 19th century, when Britain was at war with France, it was originally called Patriot Place. It changed its name in the 1860s.

You are outside Prior House. Today the building is shared by the Brighton Unemployed Centre Families

< Map Designed by Don Sargeant

> Page 197

Project (BUCFP) and the Resource Centre. It was opened in 1936 as a girls club, run by Mr Prior and later his daughter Miss Prior of whom MOLLY GRACE has fond memories. Today if you happen to wander by at 1pm on a weekday you can get the cheapest hot vegan meal in town upstairs at the BUCFP.Throughout the week they run classes where you can take up Japanese, practice yoga, learn how to feed your family on a budget or get welfare advice.

2. Tarner Home The row of pale brick Regency houses became part of the hospice set up with a bequest from Miss Letitia Tilbury Tarner who died in 1933. She lived here in the corner house, St John’s Lodge, 1 Tilbury Place. You’ll notice the entrance to the house is where a big black porch covers the steps. If you step away from the entrance you can just see over the high flint walls and view the lovely veranda where patients of the hospice would often sit with friends and family and admire the garden.

3. Mighell Street and a Georgian farmhouse Take note of the cobbles and stones that run along side the pavement – it gives a glimpse of the roads before there was tarmac. With the flint walls on your left, take a look at the big blue and white American Express building in front of you, built in 1977. The larger, brighter 2012 addition sits in front of this on Mighell Street (pronounced Mile Street by locals).

The car park and car wash on the corner was once a horse slaughterer’s. The road would have run down to Edward Street with houses on either side. GLADYS EPPS once lived here until her home was destroyed in an air raid. Her parents ran the Black Lion Pub at 47 Mighell Street. In the 1930s there were as many as 43 pubs in the Carlton Hill area – that’s almost a pub on every corner. If you cross the road and walk down Mighell Street, pass the car wash and round to the left you’ll find hidden amongst the new buildings a Georgian farmhouse still in its original form. Amex now owns the right hand side and is keen to renovate it. Notice its lovely pebbled walls, wooden shutters and typically ornate Georgian entrance.

Knock on Any Door > Walk & Tour

4. Church and Rectory Walk back up Mighell Street and turn right into Carlton Hill and up to the Greek Orthodox Church on the left. Formerly known as St John’s, it was built in the early 1840s as an Anglican Church. This was where PATRICIA and PATRICK GEORGE were married in 1946. Patricia’s bouquet cost more than anything else at a whopping £7. The church closed in 1980 and was re-opened by the Greek community five years later, but was damaged by fire in 2010 and is undergoing renovation. The red brick building opposite was the rectory, now flanked and owned by American Express.

5. Sussex Deaf Association and St John’s Place Continue uphill past the Sussex Deaf Association – originally St John’s Church Hall. The association moved here in 1982.Turn left into St John’s Place. On the right hand side are 1930s houses built to replace the homes demolished during the slum clearance. Further up on the left you’ll find the Tarnerland Nursery, in what was once the Tarner family’s garden.

6. The Setting Sun and Windmill Street Reaching the top of St John’s Street you can stop for a drink at the Setting Sun and discover a magnificent view of Brighton from the top of Tarner. On bonfire night you can see fireworks as far as Worthing. The pub sits on the corner of Windmill Street. This is where RON BURTENSHAW lived with his mother. He described it as ‘a street of pretty bay windows, neatly painted walls.’

7. Sussex Street and Tarner Estate Retrace your steps and walk down the hill on Sussex Street. Kelly’s Directory for 1930 lists 32 shops in this street alone, including three beer retailers (probably jug shops). On the right is the Tarner Estate built in 1931, it replaced Apollo Terrace which collapsed and a large area thought to be grazing fields. Tarner Road is where SHIRLEY TIDEY once lived. Shirley’s mother Rose was the landlady of the London Arms at 85 Sussex Street and served bread puddings on cold nights.

Admire the sea view as you pass Tarner Park and its tower – it was thought that Letitia Tarner’s father built

the tower so he could look out for his ships and then travel to the London docks to oversee their unloading.

Now you have walked round three sides of the Tilbury Tarner family’s garden. Continue down past the Carlton Hill Infants’ School.

8. John Street The brick building on the corner of John Street and at the bottom of Sussex Street was once the Lion and Unicorn pub. Everyone called it the Blue House and we’ve heard lots of different explanations for the name. Some say stolen lead was sold here (lead was called bluey), others maintain it was because the blue line tram stopped near by. It was also supposed to be famous for fights between soldiers and sailors (sometimes featuring women with pokers) or that it was a favourite meeting place for off duty police. It could be that the swearing was fierce or that it was once painted blue. It has now been converted into flats.

At the Albion Hill end of John Street used to be Chates farm. It was a working farm from the 1860s on land rented from the Tarner family. It was derelict for a long time and the site was eventually developed in the 1970s when Chates Farm Court flats were built on the corner of John Street and Albion Hill.

9. Kingswood, Milner Flats and tower blocks Cross the road here towards the Kingswood Maisonettes. To your right you can see the towering block of flats that were built in the 1960s and now dominate the landscape. Follow the steps by the railings down past the Kingswood Maisonettes built in 1938 and the more recent colourful wall mural. This will take you pass the Milner Flats – the first block of flats to be built by Brighton Corporation in 1934 – and onto Morley Street 10. Morley Street Looking back up the hill behind you, Sussex Street once ran the length of Morley Street until it met Grand Parade – there are railings there now but imagine the common sight of a runaway horse and carriage! Stop to look at the clinic on the corner of Ivory Place. At

11.08 on the morning of 29th March 1943, a bomb tore through the market on Circus Street and bounced into the clinic. Nineteen people died in the attack, including pregnant women and small children attending the clinic. Spitfires pursued the German bombers and one of the German pilots is buried in Bear Road Cemetery.

EILEEN JONES watched the planes from her bedroom window – they were so close she could see the German pilot in the open cockpit. BETTY FIELD was there at the clinic that morning with a toothache, she was saved when a nurse pulled her into a shelter and they had to wait to be dug out.

11. Circus Street North Side Pass the clinic and turn left into Circus Streetwhich was named in the early 1800s after a riding school called the Royal Circus which stood at its north western corner. Brighton Dome was another circular building that started as an indoor exercise yard with the royal stables around it. During World War I Circus Street was the site of the Lights & Co Munition Works.

The girls working in the factory wrote a song to raise money in support of wounded soldiers in Brighton hospitals Though our cases may be hard, Never mind; And the Boss is on our guard, Never mind; For the boys are at the front, And they’re bearing all the brunt, So you’ve got no room to grunt, Never mind.

The now abandoned fruit and vegetable market on your left, its doors and walls now decorated by local graffiti artists, was opened in 1937. DENNIS SMITH helped to build it. On your right is the All Night Café where PAT MEARS found his parked veg lorry taken over by the Brighton and Hove Albion team back in 1983. Behind the café you can see the backs of the houses on Grand Parade – a crazy miss-match of building styles. Can you spot the use of bungaroosh, a building material unique to Brighton? It is a mix of large

> Page 199

flints, small pebbles and mortar made with salty sand from the beach. Notoriously vulnerable to damp and variable in strength, a Brighton conservation officer once said you could probably demolish a third of Brighton with a blast from a well-aimed hose.

JANE Bom-Bane describes Bungaroosh in her musical 24 George Street And down into the cavities, it all comes flying – whoooosh!

Bunga! Bunga! Bunga! Bungaroosh! Bungaroosh!

Sacks o’ stones, bags o’ bones and rusty roofers’ nails Broken dishes, token fishy skeletons and scales Bungaroosh galore was solid packed my friends, but oh!

How the house is still a house – we’ll never ever know.

12. Circus Street South Side At the Carlton Hill end of Circus Street is the school for Brighton and Preston on your left, built after the Education Acts of the 1870s when education was first made compulsory. The fish market, re-located here from the beach in the 1960s, was once on the site now occupied by the Wood Centre. From here you can look across Victoria Gardens – the fashionable centre of Brighton in the Regency era before everyone wanted a sea view – to the beautiful houses of Marlborough Terrace. Compare and contrast the elegant uniformity of their fronts with the higgledy-piggledy patchwork of the rears of those on Grand Parade seen from Circus Street.The huddled masses of Carlton Hill were meant to be out of sight and out of mind. The University of Brighton now stands opposite Circus Street and was once a Catholic Church. It is said that there used to be fights outside between the Italians and Irish that were ignored by the police who considered it a domestic dispute.

Knock on Any Door > Walk & Tour

13. Kingswood Street and Carlton Hill Turn left up Kingswood Street – the name for the lower slopes of Carlton Hill – up towards the car park on your left. Here ran Carlton Row, where FRED RICHARDSON’S family lived before they were rehoused.

Woburn Place ran just above and was also slum-cleared in the 1930s.A century earlier VALERIE MAINSTONE’s great, great, great grandmother Harriet ran her laundry business here. During the slum clearance programmes, the council was buying up houses owned by different people – one at a time. Sometimes a whole street would be empty but for one or two families waiting for the tenancy to finish.

Continue up Carlton Hill, using the Tour map to imagine all the little streets that once ran either side of the hill.

Nelson Place featured in Graham Greene’s 1938 novel Brighton Rock. It was the slum area that the teenage gangster Pinkie had escaped from and he was horrified to discover that his ‘girlfriend’ Rose lived there. Take a rest outside Milner Flats and Kingswood Maisonettes.

Nelson Street still exists as a pedestrian walkway, in front of the flats.

It was said that back in the 1930s it was an area so rough that police officers would walk the streets in twos in fear of going out alone. The police HQ on the corner of John Street was apparently re-located here for convenience. Continue up Carlton Hill past the site of the old St John’s School. Opposite this was the Italian Arms, the pub forced to change its name during World War II. Carlton Hill School on your left was the site of Richmond Hill, PATRICK GEORGE grew up here before his family were moved. The houses ran to the left, to the right were the stables.

14. White Street Continue up past Tilbury Place where you started your tour, turning right into White Street after the rectory.

On the far eastern side there is a section of terraced housing that differs in style to the other houses in the

street. The original houses were destroyed during a bombing raid on 18th September 1940. Eleven people were killed.

15. Edward Street and the Little Globe The bottom of White Street meets Edward Street and on the opposite side of the road look up and you’ll see a handsome mural that once decorated a pub called the Little Globe. The building is now a solicitors. Cross the road, head right and down Edward Street. Further down was the Great Globe public house. In 1844 John Lawrence, a petty thief, tried to steal a roll of carpet from a nearby shop after drinking heavily in the Great Globe. He was arrested and while being questioned he killed the chief constable with a poker. Lawrence was hanged at Lewes.

Turn right down St James Court – the little alleyway just after the pub – for a glimpse back in time to the 1930s. Houses back onto more houses, the high walls of each backyard contain the banter of its traders. Follow the alley around and back out onto George Street.

The final stop is Pullinger’s, BARRY WINDHAM’S shoe shop further down on the right – they’ve been in business since 1915, but it will cost more than the two pence for a sole and heel that Barry charged in the late 1970s when he first started work here.

17. St James’s Street You’ve reached St James’s Street and the end of the tour. Feel free to wander in either direction. To the right you’ll pass a chemist, which used to be Sainsbury’s and where GED DUNCAN’S grandfather was the manager for 40 years from 1935 to 1975. Now a new Edward Street was cleared and widened to make way Sainsbury’s dominates the bottom corner.Turn left and for a growing population of cars. It was once lined with stop to say hello to MIKE WATTS who runs the last of shops and traders, tall town houses and gas lamps.You’ll his grandfather’s fishmonger shops. Get yourself a pint pass Dorset Gardens on your left; these handsome, of prawns and ask Mike to describe first-hand how this tall houses are not unlike the houses that were pulled street alone has changed just in his lifetime. Take it all down. Even when it was damp, cramped and crumbling in – you never know one day someone may stop to ask on the inside, it was customary to keep your house and you of your memories of the area! most importantly the front door and steps presentable at all times. The streets were clean, free of cars and full of the sounds of children playing.

16. George Street Continue walking until you see JIMMY RICHARDSON’S hairdressers on the corner of George Street. Wander down here and you’ll find a wealth of little independent traders; there’s SAM LAMBOURNE’S Jog Shop on the left.To the right is Bom-Bane’s café, have a peek through the window at all the little tables, each one does something different to entertain its guests. Browse the menu and wave to Jane who sits above the door as you pass by. If you’re thirsty have a drink at the Queen’s Arms. In 1908 the landlady adopted Siamese twins and put them on the stage as the Hilton sisters. They lived most of their lives in America appearing in two films and even having a musical made about them.

> Page 201

The Colours of Tarner A collaborative poem after a guided walk around Tarner on August 9th 2010 written by Cathy Cullen, Christopher Skinner, David Boxall, Judith Greenfield, and Lorraine Beal. Edited by Bridget Whelan The dusty black, charcoal black, boot scraper by the old door is an archway back to a horse and mud and fire grate time.

The Tarnerland Nursery shows The silhouette of Peter Pan in the colours of a Victorian chimney sweep Autocratic high-rises, aloof in fag-ash grey, Are shaped like Apollo 13, And tower over the jolly, lived-in houses below.

Red paving on the street Red bricks in the houses, Red the colour of hard work, And the dust and the sweat that made them Red chimney pots are birthday cake candles Waiting to be lit Or jaunty fellas with ruddy caps, that can’t hide their age and need to lean on one another Protective blue netting like the drying nets on Hastings beach Flag the change that’s coming The change that’s coming….

Tarner Land Nursery 2012 / Jess Huffman

Knock on Any Door >

Marion Devoy Marion was born in 1942 on the Manor Farm Estate.

Her parents lived on Albion Street before being rehoused in 1936 as a result of slum clearance. Marion moved to Windmill Street in 1972 and to Albion Hill in 1977.

BIOGRAPHIES This is a list of past and present Tarner residents who have been interviewed for this book and those who have written about their own experiences and the experiences of their family.

Rene Ansell Born in 1923, Rene moved from Southampton to Richmond Place to live with relatives during World War II. She sheltered in the crypt of St Peter’s during bombing raids, worked by day in a government office and by night was a singer in a hotel dance band.

Lorraine Dawnett Beal Lorraine was born in 1948 in her grandmother’s home in Tilbury Place. She lived there with her family until they moved to Woodingdean in 1955.

Ronald Burtenshaw Ron was born in 1940 and lived with his mother in Windmill Street until 1971. Ron ran an architect firm before becoming a landscape designer.

Jean Collins Jean was born in 1929 in Sussex Terrace before moving to Scotland Street and later Richmond Terrace.

Ged Duncan Ged was born in Shoreham in 1961 and grew up in Brighton and Hove. His grandfather managed Sainsbury’s in St James’s Street from 1935 to 1975. Ged recorded his grandfather’s memories in 1990, a few months before he died.

Paul Doyle Paul was born in 1940 and lived in the Milner Flats in the early 1960s. An artist in his spare time, Paul worked in demolition in the Tarner area for most of his working life. Paul died while this book was being prepared.

Gladys Epps Gladys was born in 1920 in Mighell Street, opposite the home of Miss Letitia Tilbury Tarner. Gladys never returned to the area after her own home was badly damaged in a bombing raid during World War II. Betty Field Betty was born in 1932 and went to Queen’s Park Infants, St Mary’s Junior and Brighton Intermediate Senior School.

Molly Grace Molly was born in 1933 in Cavendish Street, one of six children. The family moved to St John’s Place when their street was demolished as part of the slum clearance programme.

Judith Greenfield Judith was born in 1947 and is a frequent visitor to the Tarner area. She now lives in a South Downs village.

Patricia George Born Patricia Doo in 1924 in Little George Street, Patricia met her husband Patrick at 16 and they married in St John’s Church in 1946.

> Page 203

Patrick George Patrick was born in 1925, one of nine children. He grew up in a house on Richmond Hill, which was later demolished. His family were re-housed in St. John’s Place. Patrick was a plumber and worked at the Tarner Home.

Valerie Mainstone Valerie was born in Edinburgh in 1941 but grew up in Sussex. She can trace her family back to 1800 in Brighton, Hove and Portslade, and is proud to come from a long line of washerwomen. She has been a Welfare Rights Adviser at BUCFP since 1999.

Chloe Howley Chloe was born in 1975 in Brighton. She has vivid memories of visiting her grandparents in Richmond Heights.

Pat Mears Pat was born in 1941. After leaving school Pat worked in Circus Street wholesale market where his father owned a stall.

Ron Jewell Ron was born in Claremont Place in 1919, the eighth of nine children. As an engineer he worked for Adam West and other large engineering firms and was on active military service in World War II. Eileen Jones Eileen was born in 1926 and lived in the flat above the Public Assistance Office where her father worked.

During World War II Eileen was in the Land Army and went on to work in local care homes.

Malcolm Keeping Malcolm was born in 1940 on Albion Hill. Malcolm worked in electronics for many years.

Josie Knowelden Josie was born in 1937 in the Milner Flats which her father helped to build and where she still lives. Josie worked as a cleaner at Sussex University for over 30 years.

Sally Latter Sally was born in 1965 and lived in St John’s Place until 1970. Sally now lives in Hove.

Sam Lambourne Sam was born in 1948. An international marathon runner, Sam’s Jog Shop has been in George Street for over 25 years.

Knock on Any Door > Biographies

Joan Moorhouse Joan was born in 1936 in William Street, where she lived until she married in 1958. Her Scottish grandmother married a fisherman from Brighton.

Sean de Podesta Sean was born in 1953. He moved to the Tarner area when he and his wife were expecting their first child.

Dorothy (Dot) and Cliff Raymon Dot was born in 1930 in India, Cliff in 1922 in London.

They met outside the Astoria cinema in 1952 and have lived in Sussex Terrace since 1955.

Charles ‘Jimmy’ Richardson Jimmy was born in 1942. He lived on Albion Hill, moving to Bevendean when he was nine. Jimmy runs the barbershop on the corner of George Street and Edward Street. His uncle is Fred Richardson.

Fred Richardson Fred was born in Carlton Row in 1919, one of nine children. After active service in World War II, he became a successful businessman.

Jane Schmidt Jane was born in 1953 and moved to Brighton in 2006 to set up Bom-Bane’s café in George Street. A musician, Jane and her team at the café wrote a musical about the history of 24 George Street.

Judy Simon Judy was born in 1948 and moved to Albion Hill in 1982. Judy has worked as a volunteer and as a member

of staff at Brighton Unemployed Centre Families Project since the mid 1980s.

fishmonger’s on St James’s Street, the last of a chain of shops which he ran with his father George.

Pamela Simpson Pamela was born in 1926 and moved to Sussex Terrace in the 1970s where she lived with her mother and two children.

Barry Windham Barry was born in 1962. He has worked at the George Street shoe repairers since 1978 in premises that have been a shoe shop since 1915.

Dennis Smith Dennis was born in 1920 in Blaker Street. Trained as a joiner, Dennis helped to build the fruit and vegetable market on Circus Street.

Sally Wood Sally was born in 1957. Her maternal family – the Mitchells – were one of the oldest fishing families in Brighton.

Graham Smith Graham was born in 1949 and was one of Brighton and Hove District Bus Company last working conductors before becoming a bus driver.

Rene Woolgar Rene was born in 1927 in the Hand in Hand public house on St James’s Street. Her father’s family – the Pages – have been Brighton fishermen since the 1600s

Sue Solly Sue was born in 1953 and lived in Sussex Terrace before moving to Burgess Hill as a young child. Sue made frequent visits to Sussex Terrace where three generations of her family have lived.

John Stevens John was born in 1935 and lived on the Tarner Estate, Tarner Road and Lennox Street. His parents were once landlords of the London Arms.

Shirley and John Tidey John was born in 1936. Shirley was born in 1935 on Tarner Road, where she lived with her extended family.

Her mother Rose ran first the London Arms and after it was demolished moved to the Royal Exchange (now The Pub With No Name) in Southover Street. Her father was a scaffolder. Shirley and John moved to Whitehawk.

Beryl Tucknott Beryl was born in 1935 and grew up in Ashton Street by the Ebenezer Chapel. Beryl lived in Whitehawk for 27 years but now lives in the Queen’s Park area.

Michael Watts Mike was born in 1943 just off Elm Grove. He runs the

> Page 205

<Home of Interviewees / 2012 / Chloe Howley

Knock on Any Door >

Oral History

by Richard Ince Can you tell me, was life hard, Did you live on bread and lard?

They say your house was damp and cold Not much fun when you got old.

Five sleeping in the front room, four sleeping in the back You didn’t have a blanket, just an old rough sack.

Can you remember going to school, Can you remember playing the fool?

There was no TV then, what did you do?

They say you played games, was that true?

Skipping, hopscotch, hide and seek.

Running, chasing all the week.

But Sabbath morning, Sunday school.

Best clothes on, that was the rule.

They say the winkle woman came on Sunday And the muffin-man – what a funday.

A shop on every corner; half a dozen in between.

One pub called the Blue House, whatever did that mean?

You never went on holiday. Wasn’t that a shame?

A yearly outing to the zoo, or perhaps a football game.

When you left school, what did you do?

Work on the fishing boats and the market too.

Washing, ironing, come rain or shine.

Starching collars for the rich man in Old Steine.

After paying the rent, not much to spend Ice skating, a dance, the flicks with a friend The police walked in pairs for their security Your doors were not locked, you were safe in your community At the end of the day, when your work was done You might sit on the pavement in the sun.

And the neighbours would stop and chat Have you heard about Fred, and this and that?

When the bombs came down you ran away But your friend and her child they died that day.

> Page 207

close. Consequently the stories of Tarner will not end with the book and exhibition at the Fishing Quarter in spring 2012. We are still looking to reach a wider audience by making the Tarner History website a valuable resource for the local community. Everything about the project can be found here: every interview recording, every photograph and every creative piece.

We will continue to build on the efforts of the last two years.

THE MAKING OF THE TARNER HISTORY PROJECT Tarner Histories is not just a snapshot of a community that has been and gone, it also reflects a community that continues to exist. The project has therefore been built not only on the involvement of those people who have lived and experienced Tarner in the past, but also those people who continue to live and experience Tarner in the present.

Jess Huffman Project manager This was an ambitious project. The initial challenge was to locate members of a community that had been displaced as far back as the 1930s. Just as the project picked up momentum and our links with this community grew it was time to draw interviewing to a

Knock on Any Door >

I have particularly enjoyed the oral history interviews but no amount of training can fully prepare you. Each and every one is unique because the setting, the rapport and the mood will always be different. Each interviewee has their own story and their own way of telling it: a presentation of facts or an impromptu memory, all of them personal.

One of the challenges that followed the interviews was reassuring our storytellers of the value of their time and their words.To be invited into their homes to hear their stories is a privilege. Without them we could not begin to understand the changes that have occurred in this neighbourhood over the last eighty years.

The subject of poverty was rooted in the project’s title but it is a difficult topic to approach and discuss without bringing preconceptions of what it means to be poor.

An enduring feeling that I have picked up from many of the interviewees, particularly those recalling the ‘slum years’, is that the experience of poverty focused the importance of community and strengthened the network of family and friends.

Having acted as both a volunteer and a project leader l have experienced first hand the value of oral history projects such as this one. Oral History allows us to view the world through the eyes and experience of a living witness and the project has been an opportunity for sharing our time and knowledge.

Chloe Howley Project manager We wanted this book and project to move away from traditional representations of local history and life stories.

There are old photographs here – lots of them – and we are proud to publish many that have never been made public before. This was only possible because of the generosity of interviewees who have donated treasured family photographs but they know, and we need to be reminded, that the past wasn’t black and white or sepia. Polished door knockers would have glinted in the sun and paint would have peeled on doors, grazed knees would have glowed red after playing out in the street. Life was full of colour back in the 1930s.

Yes, it would be a bit of a different colour palette, but by photographing the area now I am sure that past residents will relate to the textures and colours: the flint walls, cobbles, bricks and mortar. Photographing a place today adds a new dimension to the visual storytelling and the landscape that is Tarner.

We have presented photographs throughout the book to evoke feelings and set a mood. We wanted photography and graphics to be a vibrant reflection of contemporary Tarner and the people that live and use the area. Months were spent walking the streets getting close up with our cameras to reveal the neighbourhood in its textures and colours, in the fine detail of life.

Words run alongside the images from the streets to portray a tapestry of old and new, rich and poor. Some families moved out whilst others remained, newcomers have arrived to call the neighbourhood home. The people of Brighton use the area: they shop in it, work in it, seek justice at the law courts and support from the police station and job centre; or pass through it, using Edward Street as the quickest route to the Royal Sussex Hospital and all points east.

We also photographed interviewees home life and work life to give a sense of their presence now. They

talked about housing and community life and through our photographs and research a very real feeling emerged that certain aspects have remained constant over the years.The very essence of this project is basic human need: family, food, fun and a place to feel safe.

Having grown up in Brighton and with my grandparents living in the Tarner area, I have a heartfelt empathy with the people here. It was and is a part of my life. I remember after school sliding down the railings on the hill that runs down to Grand Parade from Richmond Heights.

Being allowed into people’s homes and work places photographing them and hearing accounts of their life has been an absolute honour.

For me, the project has been much more than a social documentation of a Brighton neighbourhood that was a joy to explore with a notepad and camera. It’s been my history as well.

Bridget Whelan writer in residence Hearing the deadly whine of a doodlebug on a recording helped us to imagine what it must have been like living during World War II. Nothing, however, had as much impact in the writing workshops I ran as the voices of the Tarner residents interviewed for this project.

It was a privilege to hear first-hand accounts and be reminded of the hidden cost of war and the price of living on the margins without a safety net. Gladys Epps was a teenager when she lost her best friend and her home in one brief bombing raid. The experience forced her to leave the neighbourhood where she grew up and she has never returned. In two succinct and heartbreaking sentences, Ron Jewell was able to sum up the life of working class women in the years before the war.

They were worn out in those days mums. They never had a chance.

> Page 209

Just as precious are the slices of everyday life that help us travel back in time. We can picture the industrious women of Lorraine Beal’s family gathering together to make gas mantles, hear the Sunday afternoon sounds of the winkle seller and Salvation Army band and appreciate the old fisherman hanging his nets across the road, reluctant to make way for motor cars.

In addition to running writing workshops, I was also midwife to a drama group that brought a different slant to local history. The hard finality of print can’t contain the exuberance of A History of Here, a musical for children narrated by a banjo-playing pigeon and a seagull with attitude. It contained original songs, well-researched history and juggling. It evolved into a production for Brighton Festival Fringe in 2011, losing the birds along the way, but gaining Miss Tarner as a narrator. We kept the juggling.

That kind of magic is written on sand – you really had to be there – but there are videos to view and much, much more to read on our website.

Kahn Priestley ran very popular and regular Tarner creative writing sessions in Brighton Unemployed Centre with Alanna MacIntyre, Malcolm Cook, Mary Andrew, Michelle Lunn, Richard Ince and Yassin Zelestine all submitting work for this book and the project website. Some of their imaginative responses to the history and landscape of Tarner are represented here. Only a small fraction of the creative energy that emerged from this project has gone into this book, but it hasn’t been lost.You will find it on our website.

My other responsibility as writer in residence was to create a book from the wealth of material gathered during the course of this two-year project and I think it might be useful to explain how hundreds of hours of interview were pared down to less than 70,000 words.

Early on we agreed on the following editorial policy: Repetitions, half sentences, small talk and asides have been cut. They pepper all good conversations, but can get in the way of telling a story when written

Knock on Any Door > The Making...

down. Occasionally some words have been added for clarity and in some instances the order in which information was originally delivered has also been altered to make a more coherent narrative.

As a team we have striven to respect and retain the individual voices recorded here: their character, their way of looking at the world and their way of communicating.

Everyone interviewed by the oral history team is present in this book, but we couldn’t include all the stories we heard or every memory shared. The transcripts can be read online and the full recordings of the original interviews are also available on the website.

This book is a history of continuity and change and – perhaps more than anything else – it is testament to the redundancy of labels. One size does not fit all and, to paraphrase Paul Doyle who died while this book was being edited, being poor in money doesn’t stop you from being rich in other ways.

We were lucky to be graced with a core team of compassionate and committed volunteers. Cathy Cullen and Richard Ince have seen the project through from beginning to end. We would like to mention them both here because, although their names don’t appear very often in this book, their week-in, week-out dedication has been the rock upon which this project stands.

This is our chance to thank Cathy and Richard and all the volunteers who have donated their time to this project: the book, the exhibition and the website are your achievements

Peter Sutcliffe BUCFP Education Worker Valerie Mainstone Historian

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This history is the result of a grass roots community project that was led by the users of Brighton Unemployed Centre Families Project. It could not have happened without the magnificent support of the centre staff and volunteers. Always encouraging, always tolerant, many played a role by answering phones and passing on messages, by sharing office space and offering information and advice. Thank you to everyone who contributed.

PROJECT TEAM Jen Sanders Project Leader year 1 Chloe Howley Project Leader Year 2 – Oral historian, Photographer, Creative design, Photo editor Jess Huffman Project Leader Year 2 – Oral historian, Photographer, Copy editor

VOLUNTEER ORAL HISTORY TEAM Abbie Mead Alex Wrein Cathy Cullen Lorna Glynn Richard Ince EDITORIAL TEAM Editor Bridget Whelan Copy Editors Bob Moulton Cathy Cullen Jess Huffman Liz Neale Richard Ince DESIGN TEAM Chloe Howley Alison Guile at LMNOP Studios TARNER TOUR & WALK LEADERS Richard Ince Valerie Mainstone SPECIALISTS Ben Jones – Historian Don Sargeant – Tarner Walk Cartographer Esther Gill – Consultant Oral Historian Trainer Kahn Priestly – Creative Writing Workshop Leader Lindsey Smith – PhotographyWorkshop Facilitator –Year 1 Tom Nancarrow – Audio Editor

Alan Morrison and Matilda Persson Transcribers Bridget Whelan Writer in Residence Ellie Moulton BUCFP Participation Worker

> Page 211

PHOTOGRAPHERS Cathy Cullen Chloe Howley Jess Huffman Joe Murphy Lorna Glynn Vienna Huffman PHOTOGRAPHS We are very grateful for the family photographs that we have been allowed to reproduce. We have also received support from the following organisations: Alamy photograph agency www.alamy.com Brighton and Hove Museum – images from A Life Less Photographed exhibition James Gray Collection – the photographic archive of the Regency Society. ww.regencysociety-jamesgray.com Sussex Postcard Club c/o Step Back In Time, 125 Queens Road, Brighton, East Sussex BN1 3WB TARNER DRAMA Andrea Slater – video: A History of Here Ann Perrin – video: Brighton Fringe Festival Production 2011 Barbara Jeffries – writer: A History of Here Ged Duncan – writer/performer Josie Darling – writer/performer Judith Greenfield – writer/performer (Miss Tarner) Leonora Piper – writer/performer Mary Andrews – writer/performer Susie Oddball – writer/performer Tiger Darling – performer Tony Spiers – writer, director and performer Tony Bell – video: A History of Here, writer Valerie Mainstone – writer

FICTION WRITERS AND POETS Alanna McIntyre Derek Jones Jane Schmidt Josie Darling Mary Andrews Molly Grace Richard Ince Susi Oddball Tony Bell Tony Spiers Yassin Zelestine ORGANISATIONS AND COMPANIES Brighton History Centre, Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, Royal Pavilion Gardens Brighton BN1 1EE Bygones East Brighton local history group, c/o Office 9, Valley Social Centre, Whitehawk Way, Brighton, BN2 5HE East Sussex Record Office,The Maltings, Castle Precincts, Lewes BN7 1YT Harvey & Son Ltd. The Bridge Wharf Brewery, 6 Cliffe High Street, Lewes BN7 2AH Pen to Paper, 4 Sydney Street Brighton, BN1 4EN The Resource Centre, 6 Tilbury Place, Brighton BN2 0GY Step Back In Time, 125 Queens Road, Brighton, East Sussex BN1 3WB Wendy Barrett and the team at the Whitehawk Library, Brighton and Hove Libraries University of Sussex for providing the following training opportunities for staff and volunteers: Dr Lorraine Sitzia for ‘Exploring Oral History: Interview Training’ and Dr Samantha Carroll for ‘Exploring Mass Observation’.

Knock on Any Door > Acknowledgements

BIBLIOGRAPHY Berry, Sue (2005) Georgian Brighton Phillimore (Chichester) Blackwell, Jackie (ed) 2003 Who was Harry Cowley? QueenSpark Books (Brighton and Hove) Collis, Rose (2010) The New Encyclopaedia of Brighton Brighton and Hove Libraries Jones, Ben (2009) ‘Neighbourhood, family and home: the working class experience in mid-twentieth century Brighton’ PhD thesis University of Sussex.

HISTORY WEBSITES NATIONAL, REGIONAL AND LOCAL Imperial War Museum: www.iwm.org.uk My Brighton and Hove: – an award-winning volunteer run history of Brighton and Hove www. mybrightonandhove.org.uk Bygones – East Brighton Local History Group www.bygones.org.uk The Regency Society – the oldest conservation society in Brighton and Hove www.regencysociety-jamesgray.com

Jones, Lavender and Pollard, Jacqueline (1999) Hilly Laine to Hanover Brighton Books Gray, Frank (2007) Kissing and Killing: A short History of Brighton on Film Film Studies Issue 10 Sambrook, Pamela (2004) Laundry Bygones Shire Publications (Princes Risborough)

SPECIALIST Airships: The Airship Heritage Trust www.airshipsonline.com Banks: British Banking History Society www.banking-history.co.uk Education: The History of Education in England www.educationengland.org.uk Police: London Metropolitan Police History www.met.police.uk Pubs Historical Pub Directory of London and southern England: www.deadpubs.co.uk

> Page 213

Remembered, Recorded and Recreated.

Knock on Any Door >

Map Designed by Don Sargeant