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1. Next Meeting: 13 Oct 2025: Peter Varlow, ‘Researching the history of Cliffe Church’
2. The Station Street Story (by Debby Matthews)
3. The Sussex Spring Assizes in 1768
4. Russian prisoners at Lewes
5. A Southover mangle maker’s repertoire
6. Touting for business (by Chris Grove)
7. Tickners of Cliffe
8. An octogenarian bridegroom
9. The Lewes Motors garage on Western Road (by Robert Cheesman)
10. The Lewes Magistrates Court
11. Historic Lewes for sale: Castle Hill House
1. Next Meeting 7.30 p.m. King’s Church Monday 13 October 2025
Peter Varlow Researching the history of Cliffe Church
Peter’s new book, ‘The History of the Fabric and Furnishings of St Thomas à Becket Church, Cliffe’, published in July, is probably the most detailed study of a Lewes church published to date, and ranges over a wide variety of topics with copious colour illustrations. In his talk he will describe how he researched St Thomas’s transformations from medieval to Puritan to Victorian styles of worship, and cover such highlights as lost Georgian features, gargoyles, paintings, the belfry and its late medieval bellframe, weathervanes, apotropaic marks and graveyards. Copies of his book will be available to purchase at the meeting. The price of £10 includes a £5 donation towards the upkeep of the church.
Admission is free for members and there is no need to reserve your place. Everyone is very welcome, but there is an entry charge of £4 for non-members, with tickets available in advance via Ticketsource.co.uk/lhg. This will be our last live meeting for 2025 – we shall be holding Zoom meetings in November & December.
2. The Station Street Story (by Debby Matthews)
The formal launch event for the latest volume in the Lewes History Group’s Street Stories series has now been arranged for 2.00-6.00 pm on Saturday 11 October at the Station Street Studio, 26a Station Street.
The event will include short talks about the research behind the new account of the history of Station Street (formerly St Mary’s Lane), an exhibition and an opportunity to meet the author.
Copies of the new book will be available at £12.50.
3. The Sussex Spring Assizes in 1768
Reproduced from the 27 February 1877 Sussex Advertiser
4. Russian prisoners at Lewes
The coloured print below, sold by a Brighton publisher, shows the Russian (mainly Finnish) prisoners of war held at Lewes during the Crimean War being visited by some genteel members of the local community. The men were largely confined within the former Lewes House of Correction on North Street, though regularly allowed out for recreation. Their officers were paroled to live amongst the local community. Many of the prisoners were skilled and ingenious woodcarvers, and their work found a ready market in Sussex. They were something of a tourist attraction.
Described as a Delamotte lithograph, this scene was said to have been drawn from life. William Alfred Delamotte (1775-1863) was an artist and wood engraver who published his own prints, and quite an elderly man by the 1850s. He was for many years drawing master at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. This was among a batch of local prints offered for sale at Gorringe’s weekly auctions in November 2024.
5. A Southover mangle maker’s repertoire
Almost 200 years ago. 18 August 1828 Sussex Advertiser
6. Touting for business (by Chris Grove)
The advertisement below placed in the 10 July 1855 Sussex Advertiser illustrates nicely the way businesses sought to increase their customer base 170 years ago.
A CARD
MR. DELL
Auctioneer, Estate Agent and Appraiser, 23 New Road, Brighton.
Most respectfully informs the Nobility, Gentry, and Inhabitants of Lewes and its Vicinity, that, should they honour him with their confidence in the disposal by Auction of their Agricultural Produce, his best energies will be devoted to realise satisfactory prices. The love of a calling ensures zeal, and zeal is the handmaid to ability.
Agent to the St. George Life Assurance Company, offices at 23 New Road, Brighton.
7. Tickners of Cliffe
For about a century, from the 1860s into the 1960s, Tickners of Cliffe were a prominent business in Cliffe High Street. For much of that time they occupied four shops, 53 & 54 Cliffe High Street on the south side of the Cliffe (later replacing no.53 by no.55) and also 7 & 8 Cliffe High Street opposite, on the north side of the street. Originally, and finally, drapers and outfitters, they extended their activities to include a wide range of housewares, furniture and fancy goods. They seem to have been one of the first Lewes enterprises to appreciate the potential value of the Christmas trade, by including an annual Fancy Bazaar aimed specifically at that market.
Because Cliffe High Street is so narrow at this point good photographs of their shops are scarce, but they are just a few shops up on either side of the street in the attached Edwardian view from Cliffe Bridge. Numbers 7 & 8 are the two shops with their blinds down just this side of Fletcher’s butchers in the postcard below, while 53 & 54 are I think in the 3-storey building beyond Rice the saddler (the 4th & 5th shops down on that side). The plots on the north side of this part of Cliffe High Street (left side in the view) are long but narrow, full of workshops and storerooms. They once stretched back to a cut from the river, used as wharves (now long filled in). The plots on the other side are not so deep.
The founder of this business was Peter Tickner (1837-1888), who had been born in Goudhurst, Kent, the eldest of at least 11 children of veterinary surgeon Thomas Tickner. He was with his parents at Goudhurst in 1841, but by 1851, at the age of 14, he had been apprenticed to a Tunbridge Wells draper. Before 1861 his parents and most of their large family had emigrated to New York State, but Peter Tickner, now in his early twenties, was left with enough resources to establish himself as a draper in Lewes.
I have not established exactly when he came to Lewes, but it was after 1855 when he established his business here – in that year’s Kelly’s directory lists a leather-cutter at 7 Cliffe High Street, an eating house keeper and beer retailer at no.8, while at nos.53 & 54 were draper Thomas Edward Cripps and clothes dealer Ebenezer Vinall (a son of the Jireh minister Rev John Vinall who had his own chapel in Lancaster Street). He is not listed in Lewes in Melville’s 1858 directory, when Ebenezer Vinall, hatter & clothier, was still at no.54. However, Peter Tickner was of Lewes when on 23 March 1861 he married Jane Wright, the youngest daughter of a High Wycombe grocer, at High Wycombe, and shortly afterwards the 1861 census finds the young couple at 54 Cliffe High Street. In this census Peter Tickner was described as a master draper employing two assistants, who may have included a young lady from High Wycombe, described as his niece, who was a milliner. He appears twice in the local press in December that year – one item notes a man being charged with obtaining a pair of boots by false pretences from Peter Tickner, draper, Cliffe (the first of many similar cases) while another records the birth of their eldest son at 54 Cliffe High Street on 18 December 1861, almost exactly 9 months after their marriage.
Their family grew apace. Eight children had their births registered in Lewes over the next 12 years, four sons and four daughters, who all survived to adulthood. None of the children were baptised at Cliffe church – Jane Wright came from a non-conformist family, and had been baptised at an Independent Meeting house in High Wycombe. The three daughters who married at Lewes in the 1890s all did so at Tabernacle, just a few yards from their home.
The business also prospered. By the 1862 Kelly’s directory the draper at 53 Cliffe High Street had disappeared, Ebenezer Vinall had left no.54 to become a full-time minister and the eating house keeper at 8 Cliffe High Street had become a shoemaker on South Street. The leather cutter survived but by 1878, when Peter Tickner placed a notice in the Sussex Advertiser to formally thank his customers for their very liberal support of his establishment over the previous 17 years, his premises also included 7 Cliffe High Street. The 1881 census records that he then employed 9 assistants and two apprentices – the staff including his two eldest sons, Frederick Thomas (19) an assistant draper and Dennis (17) an assistant tailor. The two younger sons, Sidney Herbert (14) and Leonard (10) were both still at school. In 1871 the household at 54 Cliffe High Street included four assistant drapers (one female) and a milliner, but by 1881 there were, in addition to the family, four draper’s assistants and a draper’s apprentice (two of them female), another tailor’s assistant, two furniture dealer’s assistants and a milliner, all in their late teens or early twenties and most of them recruited from outside the local area. By the early 1880s Peter Tickner’s advertisements featured not only clothing, hats and boots, but also furniture, carpets, rugs and wallpaper.
Then one May Sunday evening in 1888, while sitting quietly in his drawing room at 54 Cliffe High Street, Peter Tickner fell suddenly forward from his chair and expired. He was 51. His doctor gave the cause of his death as ‘syncope’. His widow Jane was his sole executor. For the next decade until Jane Tickner’s own death the business continued to trade as Peter Tickner & Co. The 1891 census makes it clear that it was his widow Jane who was in charge. She was described as a draper and clothier. The second son Dennis had married and established his own clothier’s business in Brighton, but the other seven children were all at home, living over the shops at 53/54 Cliffe High Street. The eldest son Frederick Thomas (29) was his mother’s manager. Alice Jane (25) was the cashier; Sidney H. (24) a clothier assistant; Edith Annie (22) and Leonard (20) were draper assistants; and Florence Mabel (18) a milliner assistant. The only child to have escaped the business was Ellen Gertrude (21), still at home but a lady’s companion. Also in the household were six other male and female assistants working in different aspects of the business and two domestic servants, all in their late teens and twenties. The oldest of these assistants was Mercy Wheeler, a Worcestershire girl, who was to marry the eldest Tickner brother the following year.
While under Jane Tickner’s control during the 1890s the business expanded its activities even further: as well as being drapers, clothiers and milliners, they also sold boots and shoes, ironmongery, furniture, carpets, china & glass, and earthenware, and were ‘warehousemen’. Ahead of Christmas they advertised their Cliffe Bazaar throughout Sussex, selling toys, dolls, novelties and Christmas cards. On the Tuesday evening before Christmas in 1891 there was a major fire in the main drapery shop at 53 Cliffe High Street that threatened to spread to the adjoining premises, but the business survived. The 1895 Kelly’s directory lists Peter Tickner & Co as having four shops in Cliffe High Street, a men’s clothiers at no.7, general house furniture at no.8, a draper’s at no.53 while boots and shoes were sold at no.54.
Six more of the children married during the 1890s. The daughters married at Tabernacle, starting with the eldest, Alice Jane, who married the son of a Luton grocer. The sons married at their wives’ families’ homes across the country: Dennis at Portland in Dorset, Frederick Thomas at Littleton in Worcestershire, and Leonard at Maidstone in Kent. Sydney went to High Wycombe, where he married Miss Emma Jane Wright, presumably a relative of his mother’s, at Trinity Congregational Church. Only one of the seven married a local – the youngest daughter married a Lewes timber merchant’s manager. Just one daughter, Edith Annie, seems not to have married.
Mrs Jane Tickner died at her home in Cliffe in August 1898 at the age of 63. Interestingly she nominated as her executors her eldest daughter Alice and Alice’s husband, a Luton grocer, rather than any of her own sons. Was this a matriarchal family, or did she feel that an impartial referee was needed? The outcome was that the Cliffe business was divided between three of the sons – in 1901 Frederick Thomas was a china, glass, boot and shoe dealer, at no.8 and no.54, while Sydney Herbert was a clothier at no.7, and Leonard a draper at no.53. Frederick & Leonard’s separate households were still in Cliffe, but Sydney had moved his family to the Wallands. The unmarried daughter Edith Annie had left the business, but was still living in Cliffe, in the household of her youngest sister, who had married the timber merchant. Three children had now left Lewes. The eldest daughter Alice was with her grocer husband in Luton, while the other two were in their mother’s home town, High Wycombe. Dennis was a clothier there, while Ellen Gertrude’s husband was an ironmonger.
The three separate businesses of F.T. Tickner, S.H. Tickner and Leonard Tickner continued through the Great War into the 1920s, though by 1927 Leonard had taken over the boot and shoe sales from his elder brother. All three families had now moved their residences from Cliffe to more salubrious parts of Lewes. Sydney Tickner died (of sudden syncope) in 1921 but his gentleman’s outfitters business continued uninterrupted under his widow – the Miss Wrights from High Wycombe proved their worth in Lewes. Like many long-established businesses, the Tickners became the owners of the premises they occupied, and others. Frederick Thomas Tickner died in 1929 aged 66, but his business also continued in the hands of his widow for at least a few years. Leonard Tickner retired, and he also died at the age of 66, in 1937. In the 1934 directory F.T. Tickner was in its last years at no.8 Cliffe High Street, and no.53 was now Woolworths, but S.H. Tickner under Emma Jane’s management occupied nos.7, 54 & 55. She was assisted by her son Eric, but he too died at the age of 38 in 1945.
In the 1951 local directory the only business still carrying the Tickner name was the gentleman’s outfitters at no.7 Cliffe High Street. It was however only the traditional name that survived, as its full title was S.H. Tickner (Geo Doland Ltd). By that time 8 Cliffe High Street had become the Polar Bear Milk Bar, no.53 remained Woolworths and nos.54/55 was still a drapers, but under another name.
Sydney’s widow Emma Jane Tickner died at her daughters home in Brighton in 1952, aged 81, while Frederick’s wife Mercy Tickner lived until the age of 90, dying in her native Worcestershire village in 1957. The business name S.H. Tickner outlived every member of the second generation of Lewes Tickners – it survived until at least 1964.
Sources: Familysearch; FindMyPast; local directories; the Keep online catalogue; and the British Newspaper Archive. The inspiration for this article was a request for information received via our website from Paul Stenson, who had just purchased a plate labelled F.T. Tickner, China Warehouse, Lewes, made to mark the 26 June 1902 coronation of King Edward VI, but who had not been to find out anything about this company.
8. An octogenarian bridegroom
The 14 June 1890 Eastbourne Chronicle recorded that on the previous Sunday morning a wedding had taken place at Jireh Chapel, Lewes, in which the bridegroom was Mr Kemp, a retired coal merchant, had “passed four score years”. He had “on more than one occasion appeared at the shrine of Hymen” while his spinster bride, Miss Rooke “is somewhat advanced in years”.
The newspaper added: “As a contrast to this we learn that recently a couple were married whose united ages were under thirty two”.
9. The Lewes Motors garage on Western Road (by Robert Cheesman)
In Bulletin no.182 the site of the Lewes Motors garage illustrated in a 1930s advertisement was confused with the site of a different garage in Spital Road. The Lewes Motors garage at 85-97 Western Road was taken over by Caffyns and later the site was redeveloped into a terrace of houses. In the 1930s the racing stables at Astley House were on Spital Road. It was Mansfield’s garage, built on that site, that was later used by the police and now has planning permission for residential development.
910. Lewes Magistrates Court
The Lewes Magistrates Court building was built in Friars Walk in 1986 by East Sussex County Council. With the 1984 IRA bombing of the Grand Hotel, Brighton, fresh in people’s minds, its design was influenced by the need for court buildings to be bomb-resistant. This expensive building had a relatively short lifetime as the Lewes Magistrates Court was closed in 2011, an early casualty of Austerity. This decision brought to an end many centuries of regular magistrates court hearings in the county town. In 2014 planning permission was granted for the demolition of this building and its replacement by the Premier Inn.
So successful has the Premier Inn been that, within a decade, none of the town’s traditional hotels remain in business. The White Hart, the Crown and Shelleys all closed, though the White Hart has reopened, now aimed at a somewhat different market.
Source: Friends of Lewes website.
11. Historic Lewes for sale: Castle Hill House
Amongst the Lewes properties currently offered for sale on Rightmove is Castle Hill House, 76 High Street, located next to Hugh Rae’s shop and almost directly opposite the entrance to the Castle. The building next door at 74-75 High Street that housed Hugh Rae’s men’s outfitters for almost a century from 1923 is thought to be one of the oldest houses in the town and in part medieval. Advertised as grade II listed, Castle Hill House has a wine cellar and a garage below street level, three main floors with front and rear rooms on each floor and an additional bedroom in the attic. There are views to the Castle from the front and over the townscape to the Downland from the rear windows. The house is currently advertised by Lewes Estates at £1.25M.
The Historic England listing describes this as a late 18th century mathematically-tiled house, with a bow window on each of the three main floors. The listing notes the quoins, the pedimented entrance door to the right and the flat-headed dormer. The massive timber framing evident inside the house (shown above, right) suggests a much older building, with the late 18th century façade most likely a re-fronting rather than a complete rebuild of the property. The experts responsible for the original listings of historic buildings carried out their assessments only from the public domain, so necessarily focused only on the buildings’ exteriors. There is likely to have been a building of some sort at this prominent location near the castle entrance for as long as Lewes has been a town. The lower part of Castle Hill House might well have once been part of the adjacent medieval house at 74-75 High Street, but Colin Brent’s ‘Lewes House Histories’ shows the two were already in separate ownership by the time the first Queen Elizabeth came to the throne.
Completed in 1952, this listing mentions a shop on the ground floor, but local directories for 1927, 1934, 1938, 1951 & 1964 all refer to it as a private residence. Colin Brent’s ‘Lewes House Histories’ identifies a list of previous owners and occupiers back to the 16th century. These include a 17th century draper, an 18th century tailor and a lady grocer in the 1820s, but other identified occupiers were barber-surgeons, attorneys and their clerks and an 18th century postmaster.
By the reign of King Charles I, Castle Hill House had come into the possession of Rev George Steere, who was Rector of Newdigate, Surrey from 1610-1661. He had previously been a schoolmaster and curate in Chailey and a sequestrator at Southover. By his will he endowed a school he had established in Newdigate, and also two university exhibitions, one for poor scholars from Newdigate and the other for poor scholars from the Lewes area. Castle Hill House was one of the Lewes houses he bequeathed to the town to fund the Lewes exhibition.
John Kay 01273 813388 johnkay56@gmail.com
Contact details for Friends of the Lewes History Group promoting local historical events
Sussex Archaeological Society: http://sussexpast.co.uk/events
Lewes Priory Trust: http://www.lewespriory.org.uk/news-listing
Lewes Archaeological group: http://lewesarchaeology.org.uk and go to ‘Lectures’
Friends of Lewes: http://friends-of-lewes.org.uk/diary/
Lewes Priory School Memorial Chapel Trust: https://www.lewesprioryschoolmemorialchapeltrust.org/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LewesHistoryGroup
Twitter (X): https://twitter.com/LewesHistory
Lewes History Group 