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1. Next meeting: 9 September 2024, Alexandra Loske, ‘Turner & Constable in Sussex’
2. Sussex Archaeological Collections volume 161
3. Lewes Heritage Open Days (by Chris Taylor)
4. Lewes Churches: two talks on Friday 4 October
5. Living in Tudor and Stuart Sussex c.1500-1700
6. The career of Edmund Dudley
7. The Mechanics Institution
8. Lewes entries from ‘Sussex in the Twentieth Century’
9. Siegfried Sassoon in Lewes
10. Farrow’s Bank, 195 High Street, Lewes (by Chris Grove)
11. Arnold Berry, artist
12. Lewes Bus Station
1. Next Meeting 7.30 p.m. King’s Church Monday 9 September
Alexandra Loske Turner & Constable in Sussex
In her talk Alexandra Loske will explain why these two great painters came to Sussex, compare their styles and choice of subject matter, and place them into the wider context of landscape painting in British art, as well as the aesthetic ideas and ideals of the picturesque and the sublime. Her talk, illustrated by examples of their local work, will finish by considering whether some more contemporary Sussex artists see themselves in the tradition of Constable and Turner.
Dr Loske is an art historian, writer and museum curator who lives in Lewes and completed her PhD in Art History at the University of Sussex in 2014. She now combines being a curator at the Royal Pavilion and a Research Associate at the University of Sussex.
2. Sussex Archaeological Collections volume 161
Sussex Archaeological Collections volume 161, nominally the volume for 2023, appeared recently, and includes three articles of Lewes interest. The first is a detailed description by Jaime Kaminski of the ‘near Lewes hoard’, the extraordinary collection of Bronze Age items discovered by a metal detectorist at a ‘near Lewes’ site identified only as on Glynde Estate land overlooking the Ouse Valley. We heard an account of this remarkable discovery from Jane Clark, the local Finds Liaison Officer, in her talk to us just over a year ago.
Volume 161 also includes an important and comprehensive account of the contribution to the Sussex economy of the many private leisure estates created in the Sussex Weald in the Victorian and Edwardian eras, authored by Lewes-based Historian Sue Berry.
Finally Frances Stenlake contributes an account of the social and political life of the non-conformist photographer Frederick Douglas Miller. While F. Douglas Miller spent most of his life in Haywards Heath, many of his Edwardian postcards feature Lewes and the surrounding villages, and he had family connections to the town. His grandfather Edward Miller was a Hailsham chemist who established himself as one of the early-Victorian Lewes photographers, while his father, the artist Frederick Miller, grew up here. F. Douglas Miller’s wife was born in Brighton, but his mother-in-law, Emily Pocock, was a native of Lewes.
3. Lewes Heritage Open Days (by Chris Taylor)
Lewes History Group will once again be represented at this year’s Heritage Open Days on 14 and 15 September. As in previous years we will put on an exhibition of general information about our activities and showcase some of the research done by members over the past 12 months.
This will include work in preparation for the next publication in our Street Stories series – Station Street – which we hope to publish next spring. The author, Debby Matthews, will be at the exhibition in Lewes House on the Saturday afternoon (14 September). She would be pleased to talk to anyone who has information, stories or pictures relevant to the history of Station Street (formerly St Mary’s Lane).
This 21 July 1907 postcard image shows a view by James Cheetham of a procession down Station Street, past the Lansdown Arms.
4. Lewes Churches: two talks on Friday 4 October
There will be two talks by Sue Berry on ‘The Story of our Lewes Churches’ and Peter Varlow on ‘St Thomas a Becket, “Lewes Hidden Gem”’ at 7.30 p.m. on Friday 4 October 2024 in Cliffe Church Hall. Book tickets (£7) via https://LewesChurchesTalks.eventbrite.co.uk.
5. Living in Tudor and Stuart Sussex c.1500-1700
The Sussex School of Archaeology and History are organising a study day for Saturday 12 October 2024 at the Kings Church Building, Brooks Road, Lewes. A series of expert speakers will explore how people in the Tudor and Stuart periods made a living, what they wore, where they lived and worshipped, and how they were helped if they became very poor. Key events included the closure of the monasteries by Henry VIII, the emergence of England as a Protestant nation, the attempt by Spain to invade England and the failure of the Spanish Armada, the English Civil War and Commonwealth, and the restoration of the Stuarts as monarchs. The course fee is £30 (£15 for online attendance) and booking via http://www.sussexarchaeology.org/tudor-stuarts-programme.
6. The career of Edmund Dudley
Edmund Dudley was born in Sussex in 1462. He was reportedly educated by the monks of Lewes Priory, and then sent by the prior to Oxford University before training as a lawyer at Gray’s Inn. In 1491 he entered Parliament, representing first Lewes and later the county of Sussex. Gaining the patronage of King Henry VII, he became one of his key ministers, and was appointed President of the Council. According to an unsympathetic historian of the day, Dudley was perfectly qualified to put into effect his master’s rapacious and tyrannical inclinations, and prey upon his defenceless subjects, using the forms of justice and the supportive authority of the king to oppress the innocent.
Dudley’s usual practice kept the appearance of the law, handing his victims formal indictments. They were then committed to prison, but never actually brought to trial. To recover their liberty they had to pay heavy fines, really ransoms, called ‘mitigations and compositions’. He also sold offices, wardships, licences to marry wealthy widows, and pardons for real or imagined offences, from treason downwards. The main end of the king and his minister was to bring everyone under the lash of their authority. Over £50,000 p.a. was collected for the royal treasury – some accounts say over £100,000 p.a. Dudley himself grew wealthy too. On his deathbed the king was seized by remorse – but not sufficiently to actually stay the hands of Dudley and his other ministers.
Just three days after the succession of King Henry VIII, Dudley and another of his father’s ministers were arrested and confined to the Tower of London, and in 1510 they were beheaded on Tower Hill. The supposed reason was not for the crimes of which they were actually guilty, but on trumped up charges that they had conspired against the sovereign. Thus, judged the unsympathetic historian, “In those times justice was equally violated whether the king sought power and riches or courted popularity.”
Edmund Dudley’s eldest son, aged only six at his father’s execution, found favour with Henry VIII and was created Duke of Northumberland. During the reign of Edward VI he became the effective ruler of the country, but his promotion of Lady Jane Grey brought him his own appointment with the executioner on Tower Hill. His grandson was Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I.
Source: W.E. Baxter, ‘Guidebook to Lewes’, 6th edition (1852) [the only source for the statement that Edmund Dudley was educated at Lewes Priory]; Dictionary of National Biography; https://allthingsrobertdudley.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/edmund-dudley1.pdf, https://theyorkhistorian.com/2016/09/19/the-rise-and-fall-of-edmund-dudley-the-hawk-of-henry-vii/ .
7. The Mechanics Institution
From Mark Antony Lower, ‘Handbook for Lewes’ (2nd edition), 1852
“This useful institution was founded in 1825, for the purpose of diffusing among the operatives of the town a taste for reading and scientific pursuits. It is far, however, from being limited to mechanics, and its list of members includes the names of many professional gentlemen, merchants and tradesmen. The building stands on the site of the theatre, and contains a commodious lecture room and a library, with a handsome committee-room on the first floor, in which is a small museum of natural history. Lectures, principally on scientific subjects, are delivered on alternative Wednesday evenings during the winter. The library contains 3,000 volumes, comprising many standard works in most departments of literature and science, and there is a very good collection of apparatus for philosophical experiments, with a few models, geological specimens, etc. The number of members is at present 264. The subscription of 2s 0d per quarter entitles members to all the privileges of the institution; and strangers are admitted to the lectures at a very modest charge of 6d each. In the committee-room the Board of Guardians hold their weekly meetings.
8. Lewes entries from ‘Sussex in the Twentieth Century’
Below are three more Lewes entries from William Thomas Pike’s 1910 book ‘Sussex in the Twentieth Century’. Today we would call such an enterprise vanity publishing.
9. Siegfried Sassoon in Lewes
Siegfried Loraine Sassoon is best known as a Great War poet. He was born in 1886 at Matfield in Kent, where he grew up in the house built by Harrison Weir, another writer with a Lewes connection [see Bulletin no.83]. He was the son of a Jewish banker who was disinherited when he married a non-Jewish wife, but his father fled his wife and three young sons when Siegfried was aged four and died of TB when he was nine. Siegfried’s first name came not from any German background, but from his mother’s love of Wagner. As a young man he was educated at Eton and Cambridge and had a trust fund that provided him with an income of £600 p.a., so while he had no need to seek employment, he was not as wealthy as many of his friends. In the 1911 census, aged 24, he lived in Kent with his widowed mother and gave ‘literature’ as his occupation.
In the years before the Great War he often hunted with the Southdown Hunt, whose master was his school friend Norman Wilfred Loder – in his post-war fictionalised autobiography ‘Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man’ he appears as ‘Sherston’ and Loder as ‘Milden’, while Lewes is ‘Downfield’. A transforming experience of the shy and solitary ‘Sherston’ is his winning a point to point race, and Sassoon is remembered as having won a members’ race in the hunt races at Cooksbridge Farm.
When the Great War was imminent Sassoon came to Lewes and enlisted as a trooper in the Sussex Yeomanry, bringing with him the horse Cockbird, on which he had won the race. This cavalry territorial unit, primarily intended for home defence and suppressing civil disorder, will have included many men he knew from his time with the hunt. He stayed at Lewes House with his friend E.P. Warren, and the Yeomanry’s drill hall was on Watergate Lane.
He did not remain for long in the Sussex Yeomanry. He re-enlisted as an officer in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, served fearlessly in the trenches in France and was awarded the Military Cross. His disenchantment with the mass casualties of the war is reflected in his poetry, and in another postwar book, ‘Memoirs of an Infantry Officer’. He lived until 1967, reaching the age of 80.
Siegfried Sassoon in 1915
Sources: https://runningoutoftime570605305.wordpress.com/2020/10/22/siegfried-sussex-yeomanry-and-poppies/; Wikipedia; Familysearch.
10. Farrow’s Bank, 195 High Street, Lewes (by Chris Grove)
Founded in 1904 by Thomas Farrow, Farrow’s Bank opened a branch at 182 High Street on 28 June 1909. On 19 June 1911, the branch advertised that it had moved to 195 High Street, Lewes. The bank also had branches in Hove, Brighton, Worthing, Shoreham, Newhaven, and across the whole country. The bank was also called The Sussex Land Bank.
Farrow himself lived at Dewbrook, Hadlow Down, and operated the Sussex Land Bank from its branch in Lewes. The bank is infamous for its fraudulent activity which led to it crashing in 1920 with the prosecution and conviction for fraud of Thomas Farrow as its Chairman, the bank’s deputy Chair, and its Chief Accountant. Thomas Farrow was sentenced to four years in prison.
Farrow was born in Catton, near Norwich, in 1862. He qualified as a solicitor and then, after moving to Surrey, worked as personal secretary to W.H. Smith, the leader of the House of Commons. He was also personal secretary to Robert Yerburgh, the president of the Agricultural Banks Association. He wrote a book that was critical of bankers and the manner in which they served the public in 1895, and set up the Mutual Credit and Deposit Bank in 1901, followed by Farrow’s Bank in 1904.
As regards the Sussex Land Bank, a letter to the Editor of the Sussex Express published on 28 April 1911 raised early questions about how the business was run. Henry C. Devine, author of ‘People’s Co-operative Banks’, asked why Farrow had said that the Sussex Land Bank would be “entirely independent” of his bank, while immediately afterwards in Farrow’s Bank Gazette (the shareholders’ organ) under the title of “Our new agricultural department,” it was stated that it was being established by the directors of Farrow’s Bank as a “department in connection with the branch at Lewes”.
He went on to note that the new bank named as patrons over seventy Sussex noblemen, MPs, Magistrates, chairmen of public bodies and landowners. He also questioned why Farrow had said that the new bank was not to be run on a co-operative basis when it had said that the institution was to be conducted upon the lines of the successful Continental Land Banks, which were known to be mainly co-operative mortgage credit institutions, or under state supervision with special safeguards and other beneficial features.
Farrow’s Bank focused on small savers and borrowers, offering higher rates of interest for savers and more generous terms to borrowers. It also opened for longer hours than other banks, which made it popular. An article in the Sussex Express entitled ‘Farrow’s Bank and the Budget’, refers to it as ‘the People’s Bank’ offering what it describes as gilt-edged Popular Deposit Notes paying three to five per cent interest tax free, and redeemable on demand. These terms were attractive and the bank grew rapidly while reporting high profits. However the bank was actually losing money, which it hid in its balance sheet by overvaluing its assets such as agricultural land.
Farrow attempted to sell the bank in 1920 to a US investment bank but their due diligence exposed that the bank was insolvent and it then crashed. Creditors received five shillings in the pound and its depositors, three shillings and sixpence in the pound.
Over the twelve years up to its failure, the bank had in reality lost over £1 million, despite reporting good profits, paying dividends, and transferring claimed surpluses to reserves. There were widespread reports in the press of those who lost money and at least one example of someone who took their own life as a result of these losses. There must have been many in Lewes who lost money but, surprisingly, there are no reports in the local newspapers naming any victims. Thomas Farrow himself died at the age of 72 in August 1934 at his cottage in Easthampnett, near Chichester.
11. Arnold Berry, artist
Watercolours and signed prints by the Sussex artist Arnold Berry appear fairly regularly in local auctions and on ebay. His works are mainly picturesque views of the towns of coastal Sussex, from Rye to Shoreham. They appear to date from the early 20th century. Motor cars do not figure in his work, but ladies’ skirts have risen above the ankIe, so probably dating from after the Great War.
His prints were for sale in the 1930s
I have encountered three Lewes views of his, one featuring the High Street viewed from the Bottleneck, another the view to the Barbican and the third Keere Street.
Very little, however, seems to have been recorded about the artist himself. He is not noted as having exhibited in any of the usual major galleries in the period up to 1940.
Anything known?
12. Lewes Bus Station
Further plans for the re-development, or perhaps more accurately the over-development, of the Lewes Bus Station site are now before the South Downs National Park planning committee. Despite the very clear public interest in the retention of exactly this type of facility at such a suitable central location, it seems unlikely that the National Park planners have the appetite to resist the profit-motivated developers, or that they would be supported by the planning inspectorate were they to try.
However, those with an interest in the history of this site now have the opportunity to purchase on ebay a plethora of photographs that record the use of the site for this public purpose throughout the second half of the 20th century. The example below is stated to date from 1973. Do we have members with an interest in recording the history of this site, and ensuring that an accessible record survives?
Another town centre site that has languished derelict for decades but now attracted the attention of developers is the riverside warehouse and wharf last used by the Parsons Brothers (later Wenban Smith) timber business. Plans for its redevelopment are now being drawn up, and a Facebook group has been established in the hope of being able to input into this process, so that it includes perhaps a riverside wharf and some public space, along with the inevitable luxury apartments.
See: https://www.facebook.com/groups/leweseastgatewharf
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: https://twitter.com/LewesHistory
Lewes History Group 