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1. Next Meeting: 9 March 2026: Chris Taylor ‘Hospitals in Lewes’
2. The distress sale of Miss Sarah Harben’s stock in trade
3. The Great Lewes Gale of February 1866
4. Caleb Rickman Kemp, Mayor of Lewes
5. Edward Reeves opens his Lewes business
6. A new Soup Kitchen for Lewes
7. Executions in Lewes
8. Historic Lewes for Sale: 1 Prince Edward’s Road
9. Commemorating a remarkable Lewes doctor (by Chris Taylor)
1. Next Meeting 7.30 p.m. Zoom Meeting Monday 9 March
Chris Taylor Hospitals in Lewes
In his talk Chris will offer a survey of the various institutions that have, over several centuries, provided people in Lewes with medical care and treatment, including the medieval Priory, an 18th century pest house, 19th century infirmaries and a 20th century sanatorium.
LHG members can register free to receive the Zoom link for the last of our winter Zoom meetings.
Non-members can attend via Ticketsource.co.uk/lhg (price £4.00).
2. The distress sale of Miss Sarah Harben’s stock in trade
This notice of a distress sale of the stock of Sarah Harben’s haberdashery and millinery business comes from the 30 December 1793 Sussex Advertiser. When a business was unable to pay its debts, the standard process was for the debtor to hand over control of their entire estate and all their personal property to trustees for their creditors. Sarah Harben’s business may have been a casualty of the failure of Thomas Harben’s Lewes bank earlier in 1793. A business owner unable to satisfy their creditors was likely to find themselves in gaol for debt, at least until their creditors were satisfied that they had done all they could to meet their obligations.
The Thomas Dicker mentioned above had been the managing clerk of Thomas Harben’s bank. After its failure he become first the managing clerk, and some years later a partner, in another Lewes bank that had been formed in 1789 by Francis Whitfeld, Joseph Molineux, Richard King & Benjamin Comber. Harben’s bank was the original Lewes Old Bank, but after its failure Whitfeld & company, previously called the New Bank, took on the Old Bank’s name and its accounts, as well as its managing clerk. Banister Flight had been one of Thomas Harben’s partners in the Lewes Old Bank until its collapse. Thomas Harben’s other banks, based in Brighton & Horsham and with different sets of partners, also collapsed in 1793. These bank failures were the consequence of a cash-flow crisis. As banks are legally liable to repay all their depositors on demand but make long-term loans using the money they have deposited, any loss of confidence, whether well- or ill-founded, would create a run on their available cash. When the cash ran out, and an anxious depositor could not be repaid, the bank had failed. In fact, after the delay necessary to realise their assets, the Harben banks were able to repay all their creditors in full. Nevertheless, the reputations of both the bank and its partners were gone forever.
The surname Harben is uncommon locally, so it seems likely that Sarah Harben will have been a relative, very likely one who had received a loan from the Harben bank to establish her business that she was unable to repay until her stock was sold. It is significant that her trustees are both associated with the Harben bank. The forced sale of her stock by the trustees for her creditors at below cost price will have done nothing to help her overall situation. She was collateral damage.
3. The Great Lewes Gale of February 1866
On Sunday 8 February 1866 a violent gale affected Lewes. There was furious wind and rain all day, causing havoc in the town. Those venturing out of doors were, according to the 14 February 1866 Sussex Advertiser, in continual danger from falling chimney pots and flying tiles. The river was high, and the Pells and other areas bordering it were flooded. The newspaper listed the most serious damage to the town.
- At 10 New Street the tile roofing was partly blown away.
- In Sun Street one house lost most of its roof tiles, many lost tiles and chimney pots.
- In Fisher Street many tiles were blown from roofs into the road
- In Abinger Place the tile fronting of Mr French, greengrocer, was badly damaged.
- A small tree was blown down in the swimming baths.
- The brickwork over the back doorway of a house in Castle Banks was forced away
- Nearby Mr Crosskey’s stable was shorn of most of its roof.
- The soot shed of Mr Tidman, chimney sweeper, ‘lost its head’ with the rain then falling on his soot supply, causing may pounds of damage.
- The Dispensary called on Mr Tidman’s services, where the collapse of Mr Crockford’s chimney brought a great heap of soot down, and scattered the fire onto the carpet.
- Mr Twigg, fruiterer, North Street, had a tall chimney blown to the ground.
- The stone roof was much damaged at Mr Hammond’s, 92 High Street.
- The stone roof was partly stripped from Mr George Baker’s house, at the top of Keere Street.
- In Priory Street, Southover, plenty of loose tiles and chimney pots were lost.
- The ‘Morning Star’, St Ann’s, had the front tiling much damaged.
- Some cottages nearby lost part of their roofing.
- A chimney at Mr Burfield’s, greengrocer, lost most of its supporting brickwork.
- Mr Wilmshurst’s house lost a number of tiles.
- White Lion Lane, an area where the houses are not kept in very perfect repair, had tiles and chimney pots flying about in all directions. There was so much debris that the lane became impassable until it was removed.
- In Lansdowne Terrace and Friars Walk a number of chimney pots and loose roofs came to grief, in addition to clay tiles and slates being lost.
- The Windmill beer-house near the gaol had its sign blown off.
- A summer arbour at a house opposite Southover church collapsed.
- At the County Gaol the great number of slates blowing off the roof made it dangerous for the officers move about the prison. A skylight was lifted off the Governor’s residence and had to be replaced by tarpaulin. One of the windows at the chaplain’s residence was blown in.
- The police station and County Hall also lost some roof slates.
- Some of the old Horsham stone that covers Southover church was blown off.
- At St John’s church a portion of one of the Gothic widows was blow in.
- The tower over the Fitzroy Memorial Library was much damaged and expected to fall.
- The steam shaft at the Sussex Advertiser office became unstable and threatened to fall.
- Mr Markwick’s mill at Malling sustained some serious injuries and the blacksmiths’ services were requisitioned on Sunday night.
- The office chimney of Mr Hillman’s (brewers) was blow down.
- A signal post with an iron ladder attached was blown across the track just before a train was due, but the driver managed to stop the train in time and the obstruction was removed.
Fortunately, there were no serious injuries. A tile fell off a house onto the head of Mr Read, milkman, without doing him much harm. A little child blown down by the force of the wind in Southover could not get up again, but after crying in the road for some time two men carried her to her house, unhurt.
4. Caleb Rickman Kemp, Mayor of Lewes
The 3 January 1884 Hastings & Bexhill Independent carried a biography of Caleb Rickman Kemp, who was the third mayor of the borough of Lewes, and a leading member of the Society of Friends.
“The Mayor of Lewes (Alderman Caleb Rickman Kemp) is the youngest son of the late Mr Grover Kemp, who was for many years the junior partner, and subsequently the senior partner, in the firm of Messrs Glaisyer & Kemp of North Street, Brighton. His worship was born in 1836, and is therefore 47 years of age.
He received a commercial education and training which has since stood him in good stead, but before settling in life he accompanied his father and the late Mr William Holmes of Alton, Hants, on a six month tour amongst the British West Indian Islands, during which time, under the auspices of the Society of Friends, the party visited the various mission stations on the islands, holding meetings with the coloured inhabitants, and making inquiries into the condition of the freed population. In the course of their journey they went to Trinidad, Barbadoes, Antigua, Grenada, Montserrat, Nevis, St Christopher, etc, holding some fifty meetings, besides inspecting schools and colleges.
This was the winter of 1857-58 and soon after his return Mr Kemp settled in Lewes, and succeeded in business the late Mr Richard P. Rickman, joining his partners, Mr George Newington and Mr John Clay Lucas. Mr Kemp, in the same year, married Jane, youngest daughter of Mr John Morland of Eastcheap, E.C., and Heath Lodge, Croydon. A few years later his present residence, Bedford Lodge, Rotten Row, was erected.
Until the formation of the Town Council in November 1881 Mr Kemp took no part in the local government of the town. In compliance with a numerously signed requisition, he the offered himself as a candidate, and was returned high up on the poll, and on the first meeting of the Council on 9 November following he was unanimously chosen one of the aldermen of the borough. In the earliest days of the Corporation he rendered valuable assistance as the Chairman of the Finance and General Purposes Committee, and on 9 November last, when chosen Chief Magistrate of the Borough, it was universally admitted that he was eminently fitted for the post, and a worthy successor of the two gentlemen who had previously filled the mayoral chair.
The Mayor is a leading member of the Society of Friends. He has held official positions in the Society, both locally and nationally, and is at the present time one of the Executive Committee. At the annual meeting of the Friends in London in 1879 he was, with others, appointed to visit the whole of the Communities of Friends in Ireland, and in this inspection, he took a great deal of interest, having visited Ireland some years before. He is also one of the Committee of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, a position his visit to our colonial possessions when a young man fully qualifies him for; and he is also a member of the Committee of the British and Foreign Bible Society, Mrs Kemp being the local hon. secretary of the Lewes Auxiliary.
The Mayor has been a total abstainer for several years, but hitherto has not placed himself in the front rank of the movement. It may here perhaps be noted that from figures recently published, it appears there are about 17 Mayors in the kingdom who do not touch alcohol as a beverage. In politics Mr Kemp is an ardent Liberal and has for years taken an active part in the Liberal organisations. In accordance with Lewes usage, however, his Worship immediately after his election resigned his position as Chairman of the Committee of the Lewes Liberal Association. He is also a member of the Reform Club.
As regards local institutions and charitable organisations, there is scarcely one with which the Mayor is not connected. He is a Director of the Lewes Infirmary, Vice-President of the Young Men’s Christian Organisation, Chairman of the Committee of the British Schools, a manager of the Savings Bank, etc. Amongst a large circle of friends he is greatly esteemed, and is uniformly kind and courteous to all. He is a frequent speaker at public gatherings, especially with those connected with some philanthropic or religious object, his remarks being invariably well chosen and gracefully received.”
Caleb Rickman Kemp (1836-1908) was one of the large family of the Brighton Quaker minister Grover Kemp, who was a partner in a prominent North Street, Brighton, chemist’s business. Both his grandmothers were members of the Rickman family of Lewes. The 1851 census finds Caleb Rickman Kemp as a scholar attending a Quaker boarding school in Hitchin. After leaving school he did two years’ work in a draper’s shop and then learned the craft of flour milling in Mitcham, joining the Croydon Quaker meeting, before moving to Lewes. By 1861 he was a merchant, but a visitor in a Guildford household. In the later censuses he was at his home in Rotten Row, Lewes St Ann, with his wife, who he had actually married at Croydon in October 1859, the year after he established himself in business. She was from the family who ran the Moorland sheepskin business, and connected to the Clarks who made and sold shoes. His house, built in 1865, was called Bedford Lodge after the Quaker Peter Bedford who had been a source of inspiration in his teenage years, but who had just died. In 1882 he added a vinery and a greenhouse to Bedford Lodge. The Kemps had no children but kept two or three female servants. Like many Quakers, he kept a journal for much of his life. His father, Grover Kemp, died in 1869.
In the censuses he described himself variably as a merchant (1861), merchant and ship owner (1871) or lime burner and coal merchant (1881). His partnership’s principal chalkpits were those at Brigdens in Glynde (on the slopes of Mount Caburn); Balcombe Pit in Beddingham near Glynde railway station; and above Glyndebourne Farm, of which his partnership held the lease for some years. All three were owned by the Glynde Place Estate, whose scion Henry Brand was a Liberal MP whose long service was rewarded by his becoming Speaker of the House of Commons and, after his retirement, Lord Hampden. The business also had a yard, warehouse, stable, coal shed and counting house in South Street, Cliffe. At the time he was elected mayor he was still active in business, but The London Gazette records that in 1890 he retired from his partnership with John Clay Lucas and Frank Newington (trading as G. Newington & Co). In the 1901 census he described himself simply as a magistrate. However, he retained some business interests: at his death he was chairman of the Lewes Gas Company and a director of the Lewes Water Company.
He was, after the deaths of Richard Peters Rickman in 1876 and Burwood Godlee in 1882 by far the most influential of the Lewes Quakers. He had begun to speak at the Croydon Quaker meeting at the unusually young age of 17, and had been made a Quaker minister at the age of 21. It was then that he joined his father in visiting the Quaker communities in the West Indies, after which he came to Lewes, taking the place of Richard Peters Rickman in the lime merchants’ partnership. His Quaker influence was not confined to Lewes: he was Assistant Clerk to the London Yearly Meeting for 18 years, and then from 1890 to 1899 the Clerk, a post he filled conscientiously, and with dignity, scarcely ever missing a meeting throughout his 27 years in post. He also joined the Committee of the British and Foreign Bible Society in 1880, becoming chairman in 1890 and later vice-president. This was an organisation in which he worked together with other Christians from a range of different theological backgrounds, including the church of England.
In Lewes he supported the Mechanics Institute, the Workman’s Institute, the Chess Club, the fund to create the Pells swimming baths, poetry evenings and the Sussex Archaeological Society. He was a member of the jury at the Borough of Lewes law days from as early as 1861. He was a prison visitor and a member of the Sussex Discharged Prisoners Aid Society. He was for a period chairman and treasurer of the Lewes Town Mission and in 1897 helped to establish the Lewes Evangelical Free Church Council. In the same year he spent £450 putting Fitzroy House into repair and repaying the debts of the former subscription library there to enable it to become a free library for the whole town. He presented a clock to the Borough of Lewes for use in its Council Chamber, and also a set of councillors’ chairs that remain in use today. At the coronation of King Edward VII he joined a deputation led by the Archbishop of Canterbury that presented a bible to the new king. Victorian Quakers mixed with their Lewes and national peers more freely than their predecessors had, though concerts and other events involving music were still a step too far and, like many Quakers, he avoided consuming alcohol.
Caleb Rickman Kemp died on 1 October 1908 and was buried in the Quaker burial ground at Lewes, where he has an unostentatious memorial. He had an obituary published in The Times. Despite his generosity he left an estate of nearly £50,000. His wife Jane survived him, and was one of his executors.
Sources: David Hitchin, ‘Quakers in Lewes’; Familysearch; The Keep online catalogue; photographs are from Wikimedia commons (left and right), and as mayor of Lewes, by Reeves of Lewes, published in https://www.lewesquakers.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/D-HItchins-book.pdf
5. Edward Reeves opens his Lewes business
Mr J. Barnett of 68 High Street, Lewes, watch and clock maker, advertised in the 5 November 1844 edition of the Sussex Advertiser that he had disposed of his business to Mr Edward Reeves.
Edward Reeves also advertised that he had available an extensive collection of watches, both new and second hand, and every description of clock. He also offered gold and gilt jewellery, spectacles for those who needed them to read, and could repair any of these goods. Old gold and silver were taken in part exchange.
Edward Reeves had thus already been established in Lewes for 14 years when in 1858 he moved his business to 159 High Street and created a daylight photographic studio in the garden.
6. A new Soup Kitchen for Lewes
The 30 March 1878 Sussex Advertiser reported that a new and commodious soup kitchen had just been completed for the benefit of residents in St John-sub-Castro parish. It had been erected at the edge of the churchyard, and had served its first customers on the previous Wednesday. The kitchen had been fitted up and the approach tastefully planted with evergreens by Mr Joseph King, who was one of the Poor Law Union guardians for the parish.
The 1871 & 1881 censuses identify Joseph King as a resident of 13/14 North Street. In 1871 his occupation is described as ‘rag merchant & marine store dealer’ (rag and bone man), but by 1881 he was described as a general dealer (another synonym for rag and bone man). In each census he employed three men and one or two boys. This was an occupation that would have brought him into daily contact with the poverty to be found in every Victorian town.
By 1892, now based at 13-15 North Street, he advertised his services as a valuer for businesses or for probate, and also as a provider of very cheap new and second hand beds, mattresses and furniture on hire purchase terms. He had been established in business for 30 years. The business survived, as Joseph King & Son, into the Great War.
7. Executions in Lewes
Up to 1831 people sentenced to capital punishment in Sussex were executed at Horsham Gaol, but it was then decided that such punishments would be carried out at the House of Correction in North Street, Lewes, redesignated as the Sussex County Gaol. Three people were executed there at well-attended public hangings over the next twenty years:
1831 John Holloway, for murdering his wife
1848 Mary Ann Geering, for murdering her husband & two adult sons
1852 Sarah French, for poisoning her husband at Chiddingly
In 1853 the old North Street Prison was replaced by the new Lewes Gaol. Ten more hangings for murder were carried out there, the first two in public.
1856 John Murdoch, aged 18, for strangling the Hastings gaoler
1866 John William Leigh, for shooting his sister-in-law, a Brighton landlady
1868 Martin Henry Brown, for murdering & robbing a fellow labourer on Newmarket Hill – his intended target was a shepherd
1881 Percy Mapleton, the Preston Park railway murderer
1887 William Wilton, for murdering his wife in Brighton
1892 George Henry Wood, for the rape and murder of a 5-year-old girl in Brighton
1912 Albert Rumens for murdering a 10-year-old girl, daughter of a Wadhurst neighbour
1912 George Mackay, alias John Williams, for shooting and killing a police inspector during an Eastbourne housebreaking
1914 Herbert Brooker for cutting his girlfriend’s throat during a train journey from London to Brighton
1914 Percy Clifford for shooting his wife in Brighton
Source: https://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/Lewes%20Prison.html
8. Historic Lewes for Sale: 1 Prince Edward’s Road
The house at 1 Prince Edward’s Road, BN7 1BJ, originally called ‘The Limes’, was built in 1870 by iron-founder John Every, one of the first houses on the Wallands Estate. The 1875 O.S. map shows both King Henry’s Road and Prince Edward’s Road laid out, but in this was the only house to have actually been built in this neighbourhood. In style it resembles the houses of the earlier development of Wallands Crescent, across the Offham Road.
John Every lived here until his death in 1892, and his widow was still here in 1901. A solicitor lived here in 1911 and a retired Indian Army major general was in residence in 1938, by which time the name (still ‘The Limes’ in 1927) had changed to ‘North Corner’. In 1951 & 1964 it was the Prince Edward Nursery School and by 1968 the North Corner Tutorial College. In 1984 it became the North Corner care home. The care home closed shortly after receiving an ‘Inadequate’ CQC rating in 2023, and the 16-bed house (with some of the rooms in a modern extension to the rear) now has planning permission for reconversion to a single residence.
The property is currently on the market with the Oakfield Estate Agency at £2.25M.
9. Commemorating a remarkable Lewes doctor (by Chris Taylor)
Dr. John Steinhaeuser (who in 1917 anglicised his surname to Stenhouse) served as Medical Officer of Health for Lewes Borough between 1898 and 1922. An enthusiastic promoter of measures to improve the health of Lewes people, he wrote extensively on the causes and treatment of TB. In 1905 he started the Lewes Sanatorium at Offham to provide rest, sunshine and good food for those in the early stages of the disease. He served heroically in France as an army surgeon during World War 1, enduring hardships from which his own health never recovered. He died aged 52 in 1923. Stenhouse practised medicine and lived with his wife and three children at St Andrew’s Place in Southover Road. The Town Council have now placed a plaque there to mark the life of this distinguished Lewesian.
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 