Craig Scott describes the cultural highlights of the county of Sussex
As an expatriate Californian of some eleven years’ standing, one of my favourite recreations has always been tracking down the historical and literary associations with people and places that figured in the lessons and schoolbooks of my younger days. Having recently moved to Brighton, I’ve been finding this a particularly fertile area for this kind of detective work.
Brighton Festival visitors from over the water (or indeed from elsewhere in Britain) will find a host of surprising sights to see when not partaking of the Festival itself. In this whirlwind tour, we look at a few such places within a couple of hours’ drive of Brighton.
Starting at the Palace Pier, we head east on the A259 coastal road, passing the famous Roedean School and some seaside towns which remind me of stretches of the Oregon and Californian coast. Kipling lived for a time in Rottingdean before moving inland to Burwash. A side road takes one along the Seven Sisters, 500 foot chalk cliffs forming the eastern end of the South Downs; Beachy Head offers particularly striking views.
Driving on through Eastbourne brings us into 1066 country. The conquering Normans built their own fortifications within much earlier Roman ruins at Pevensey; at Bexhill, a road turns inland to Battle, the site of Duke William’s famous victory over the English and the Abbey he built in thanksgiving. Though we know it as the Battle of Hastings, the town itself is some five miles away. It, too, has a ruined Norman castle, along with the Hastings Embroidery, a modern-day counterpart of the Bayeux Tapestry with scenes of British history from 1066 to the present.
A few more miles along the A259 is Rye, with steep cobbled medieval streets and buildings and the Mermaid Inn, opened in 1420. One of the greatest 19th-century American novelists, Henry James, lived for nearly twenty years at Lamb House in West Street, now a National Trust property open Wednesdays and Saturdays from April to October. It is to James that I am indebted for one of the most eloquent descriptions of how it feels to be an American living among the English:
“considering that I lose all patience with the English about fifteen times a day, and vow that I renounce them forever, I get along with them beautifully and love them well”.
For a time James would cycle over to nearby Brede twice a week to visit another, newly famous, American writer, Stephen Crane, author of the novel The Red Badge of Courage. Crane succumbed to consumption after only two years at Brede, dying in 1899 at 28. Inland now along the A21, to the A256, where Bateman’s, Kipling’s house at Burwash, is kept exactly as he knew it. There is also his 1928 Rolls Royce, a restored water mill grinding corn, and an old water-driven turbine.
Near East Grinstead, in the area around Hartfield, are the locations which inspired those in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories of A. A. Milne, who lived at Catchford. Along the B2026 and B2110, one can still see Five Hundred Acre Wood (One Hundred Acre Wood in the stories), Poohsticks Bridge, Gills Lap (Galleon’s Lap), and the memorial to Milne and his illustrator E.H. Shepard.
Nearby at Crowborough, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lived at Windlesham Manor and wrote many of the Sherlock Holmes stories. He is buried in the grounds.
Fans of Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga will want to make a pilgrimage to Bury House, four miles north of Arundel in West Sussex. The author finished the Saga here, and developed a reputation for philanthropy, building cottages for his servants in Bury village before his death in 1933.
These are only a few of the many literary and historical associations with Sussex; the visitor wishing to pursue them further should pick up a copy of Writers in Sussex, by Bernard Smith and Peter Haas, at local bookstores.
From BRIGHTON FESTIVAL MAGAZINE, December 1986, Vol. I No. 2.