fulking.net - This is the community website for the people of Fulking, West Sussex

February 2017 Pigeon Post Published

Sloe Gin

Sloe Gin and Homemade Liqueur Competition: Monday 6th February, Royal Oak Poynings (Village Night — table reservations advisable). Entries in by 8:00pm (a jam jar will do), £1.50 per entry (2016/2017 fruit only). Two categories:

(i) Poynings — Sloe Gin Cup and prize for best liqueur (fruit+spirit);
(ii) Foreigners — Fulking, Newtimber, Pyecombe, and Woodmancote.

How many species?

Two new local history articles

Following an eighteen month furlough, we are pleased to announce the publication of two new local history articles on this website: a guest post by Stewart Angell, author of The Secret Sussex Resistance, on the role that Tottington Manor played as the headquarters of the Sussex Auxiliary Units during WWII; and a new post by Tony Brooks on the rather complex architectural history of the Oldwood site with some extra material on the two major 1930s literary figures who lived, or lodged, there.

Tottington Manor: Sussex WWII Auxiliary Units HQ

Tottington Manor viewed from the east in 1949One of Britain’s best kept secrets of World War II was the Home Guard Auxiliary Units, which used the status of the Home Guard as a cover for their true activities. Tottington Manor became the regional headquarters for the Auxiliary Units in Sussex. For those not familiar with the Auxiliary Units and their objectives, some brief background is required.

The Auxiliary Units were, in effect, created to be the ‘British Resistance’ in the event of a German invasion of this country. Colonel Colin Gubbins was given the task of forming this resistance in June 1940, a time when the threat of invasion was very real. He gave them the deliberately nondescript title of ‘Auxiliary Units’ often shortened to ‘Aux Units’. They were provided with the best available weapons, including plastic high explosives, without regard to expense. The Aux Units were formed into small localised patrols all around the country. Each county was given an Intelligence Officer, holding the rank of Captain, whose initial task was to create these patrols. Although potential members of the Aux Units existed within the regular Home Guard, not all the men were recruited there. It was essential for members to have an intimate knowledge of their area, consequently farmers, game keepers, market gardeners and people of similar occupations joined their ranks, many being in reserved occupations.

Everything about their existence was kept highly secret. Each patrol required an underground hideout, known as an ‘operational base’. These bases were well hidden and purpose built to house the patrol in the event of an invasion. The operational base also contained food, water, ammunition and explosives. In the event of invasion, each patrol was to secrete themselves in their operational base and wait for the Germans to occupy their area. Emerging only at night, the patrol would then have conducted acts of sabotage. Roads, bridges and railway lines would have been targeted for destruction and lines of communication or supply would have been severed.

Coleshill House, the national headquarters and training base for the Aux UnitsAll patrol members were initially given an intensive training weekend at Coleshill House, the Aux Unit national headquarters in Highworth near Swindon, Wiltshire. This weekend course covered how to use all the available equipment effectively, especially the plastic high explosive. Further training was delivered in their own locality by regular army personnel known as ‘Scout Patrols’.

Sussex had two scout patrols, one covering the East and the other covering the West of the county. Each scout patrol had twelve men with a Lieutenant commanding them. The eastern scout patrol was made up of men from the Queens Royal Regiment, commanded by Lieutenant William Ashby and the western scout patrol comprised men from the Royal Sussex Regiment, commanded by Lieutenant Roy Fazan. Weekend training of the Sussex patrols took place at Tottington Manor. Practical work was undertaken by the scout patrols with lectures being delivered by the Intelligence Officer.

An aerial photograph from 1946 of a section of the Edburton Road, showing Tottington Manor and Tottington Manor FarmDuring the war years Tottington Manor was owned by the Ricardo family who had operated an engineering works in Shoreham. They moved the works and themselves up to the Oxford area, leaving Tottington Manor empty.

The manor’s central position in Sussex along with its isolated location made it ideal for a regional base for the Aux Units and it was duly requisitioned. The Intelligence Officer and his personnel were based at the Manor. They included a couple of drivers, a cook, a clerk in charge of paperwork, a Lance Corporal from the Royal Corps of Signals as a radio operator and a Corporal from the Royal Engineers.

Corporal Frank Mayston of the Royal EngineersThe Manor had its own underground hideout. It was built by the resident Royal Engineer, Corporal Frank Mayston, a builder by trade who lived in Henfield. He built the hideout with a few of his men “in their spare time”, as he put it. On invasion, the men based at Tottington Manor would have become a patrol themselves, using the hideout as their base. The idea was to leave the Manor looking like it had been abandoned. In fact, there were various booby traps set — such as trap wire connected to cupboard doors and inside drawers that would detonate small explosive charges when opened. Cut down green bottles were filled with explosive and a candle placed in the bottles neck. The candle once lit would become a fuse to blow the charge. Hand grenades were disguised as coal and left in the coal bucket next to the fireplace.

Plan of the Auxiliary Unit hideout beneath the grounds of Tottington ManorEntrance to the underground hideout was gained through a sliding hatch in the Manor’s cellar floor. Short corridors and a set of steps led one into the main room and adjacent store. These rooms contained bunk beds, food stores, ammunition and explosives. A further short passage led to a cooking area and terminated in an emergency exit that took the form of a two foot diameter concrete tunnel. The tunnel is forty three feet long and runs out under the Manor’s garden with its exit disguised as a drain cover. The hideout had electric lights and a water supply, both were tapped from the Manor above. A primus cooker was built into one of the walls and there was a wash basin next to it.

Two interior photos: the entrance hatch (marked as 1 on the plan) and the main room (marked as 2 on the plan) looking toward the steps and corridor leading back to the entrance hatchTottington Manor was not only used for weekend training of Sussex patrols, but also regularly staged inter-patrol competitions. An assault course for night-time training was constructed in the grounds. This course proved to be very popular with all the patrols.

Another view of the main room (marked as 2 on the plan) looking toward the adjacent explosive store (marked as 3 on the plan) with the corridor leading to the exit tunnel on the leftSupplies of plastic high explosive were brought down from Coleshill House each month to be stored at the Manor. These were then issued all over Sussex to each patrol as they were required. One unofficial use for the plastic explosive was pond fishing. Only a small piece about the size of a golf ball was needed. After the explosive was thrown into the water, the shock waves from the explosion would stun the fish, making them rise to the surface and allowing them to be harvested with a net.

A close-up of the area immediately surrounding the entrance to the emergency exit tunnel showing a glazed air vent pipe, a tap, and a telephone wire that was once connected to a lookout on the DownsTwo underground lookouts were also constructed on the Downs by Corporal Mayston and his men. One of the lookouts was half a mile to the south of the Manor, and gave a good view of the Manor and its grounds. The lookout was only big enough to house one man but had a direct telephone link to the hideout under the Manor. This would have been used to inform the men in the hideout of all the German troop movements taking place around them. The other lookout was three miles to the east, and looked out onto the roads around Poynings.

Sussex was in the front line of a German invasion and as such would have played a key role during the hours and days following the initial landings. The men within the Aux Unit patrols were all volunteers, highly trained and ready to do what they had been trained to do unseen after nightfall. Thankfully, they were never needed. It was predicted that the patrols would have had a life expectancy of just two weeks after the start of their campaign.

Stewart Angell

Harold Manhood at Oldwood

The cottage at Oldwood which burnt down in 1933.
Oldwood is the south west corner plot at the junction of Clappers Lane and Holmbush Lane. Originally part of a large apple orchard, it was the third of the five-acre plots bought by the architect Ernest Black. In 1912 there was an attractive cottage on the site, but this burnt down in 1933. Charles Clayton was Black’s partner in their architectural practice and it was one of Clayton’s daughters who produced the sketch of the cottage reproduced above.

Ernest Black sold the property to an American who used it as a holiday retreat. It was purchased next by Harold Alfred Manhood (1904–1991).

Harold Alfred Manhood
The editor of a recently published collection of Manhood’s short stories writes as follows:

H. A. Manhood was one of the most highly regarded short story writers of the 1930s. His work was praised by John Galsworthy, Henry Williamson, Hugh Walpole and H. E. Bates, who was to become a good friend. His British and American publishers, Jonathan Cape and Viking respectively, thought so highly of him that they paid him a salary to give him the time and space just to write, a most unusual arrangement which demonstrated their respect for his work. His stories were in demand both from popular papers such as the Evening News and John O’London’s Weekly, and from more literary periodicals such as the London Mercury and the Adelphi. They were included in annual ‘best short story’ anthologies and in retrospectives of the masterpieces of English Literature.

Manhood gave it all up at the height of his success and disappeared into the Sussex countryside to live in a railway carriage .. . Writer and auctioneer Frank Herrmann .. said after the war he began to resent growing editorial interference with his writing and was appalled by the tiny payments he received for his output. So in 1953 he stopped writing, bought more land, started brewing cider and never wrote another word. Shortly before his death aged 87, Manhood sold his life’s work to the British Library. [Mark Valentine]

Oldwood Clappers Lane Fulking
Oldwood Harold Manhood

Two views of Harold Manhood’s original dwelling at OldwoodOldwood became known as Manhoods. Harold Manhood originally lived there in old railway carriage (no longer on the site) and a small barn-like building which is still there today. This building, standing in an orchard as it does, may originally have been designed for apple storage. Later he had a bungalow with a garage built on the site. He was well known for the home brewed cider he produced from apples off the old trees in the grounds and it was not unknown for local lads to stop at his place for a drink before setting off for a night out in Henfield. He was also a regular customer at Springs Smoked Salmon and always insisted on choosing his own fish from the freezer room, a lengthy (and almost certainly chilly) process that occasionally involved inspecting up to 200 fish before he made his selection.

Oldwood C20

The bungalow that Manhood built
Cover of 'The Darling Buds of May', first edition

Villagers recall that H.E. Bates (1905-1974) and Harold Manhood became great friends and it is thought that Bates wrote The Darling Buds of May (later to become a successful TV series) while staying with Manhood in the late 1950s.

Bates had reviewed some of Manhood’s books in the 1930s and was to become an enthusiast as well as a friend. However, in 1932, we find him writing:

Mr. Manhood writes like a Cockney in the country for half a day, very high-spirited, slick and robust, intoxicated into a kind of rollicking ecstasy of admiration of its beasts, fields, and wenches, but without either depth of understanding or authentic feeling. There is something counterfeit about more than half these stories; they look like gold but they ring so often like brass. [Review of Apples by Night in John O’London’s Weekly, October 29th, 1932, page 182.]

But, only a few years later, Bates had come to appreciate all of Manhood’s work and was to dedicate one of his own collections of stories (Something Short and Sweet) to him in 1937. Reviewing a later Manhood collection in 1939, Bates is wholly positive:

There can be no doubt of his calibre. He is almost too rich a writer, as the thirty stories in Sunday Bugles prove, for an age which exalts aridity. He is a cornucopia to an era growing too accustomed to drinking out of paper cups. To all who care for robust, full-coloured, originally flavoured writing, Sunday Bugles must therefore be warmly recommended. [Review of Sunday Bugles in John O’London’s Weekly, February 10th, 1939.]

H.E. Bates in 1956 by Howard Coster
And, in another review of the same collection, Bates has this to say:

Mr. Manhood is a poet forced by his own time and circumstances to write in prose. This could be said of a dozen other short story writers of to-day, but it seems pointedly true of Manhood, who treats the writing of prose as a tortured process of distillation or, more aptly, as the evolution of a pattern in verbal mosaic. All who know him are aware of the tortures that prose inflicts on him; those who know only his stories must be aware that deep embryonic struggles precede the birth of his beautifully plumaged sentences.

His work is consistent in its rare oddity and flamboyance, its prolific use of startling metaphor and violent climax, his method of using the fantastic to illustrate the ordinary, the ordinary to illustrate the fantastic. His stories are so full of the kind of conceits that embroider the work of seventeenth-century poets that I feel he would have been happier in an age where the rich uses of imagination were not looked on with suspicion. He sports rather too fine a doublet in this age of pin-stripes and umbrellas. [Review of Sunday Bugles in Now and Then 62, pages 39-40, Spring 1939.]

On Harold Manhood’s death in 1991, the property was sold to a retired farmer who added a barn to store his collection of old, working, farm machinery. It was then sold on to a waste haulage operator who constructed an extensive hardstanding for lorries on the land and explored the possibility of obtaining permission to erect a mobile phone mast on the site. After about a year, it was sold again to the former owner of the caravan park in Bramlands Lane. He took up residence and transformed the appearance of the bungalow by integrating the garage into the house. The grounds were also landscaped at this time.

The reconfigured bungalow as it was in 2004Tony Brooks [with literary interpolations by GJMG]

References:

Paul Machlis (2017) H.E. Bates Companion (website).
H.A. Manhood (2017) Life, Be Still! And Other Stories, with an introduction by Mark Valentine. Sherborne: The Sundial Press.

Oldwood renewed — the residence that is to replace the bungalowCurrently popular local history posts:

The Steep Grade Railway 1897-1909 32 views
Perching Manor 23 views
The Aerial Cableway 1894-1909 23 views
Truleigh Manor Farm 22 views
The Dyke Railway 1887-1938 19 views
Tottington Manor: Sussex WWII Auxiliary Units HQ 17 views
The manor of Perching 16 views
The Shepherd and Dog 16 views
Clayton Tunnel North Portal 15 views
The Dyke in 1949 15 views

On the market

Hillbrook

Hillbrook was originally a one acre plot known as ‘Shady Acre’ and was part of Brookside Nurseries in the 1920-1950 period. The nurseries were sold in 1953 and one of the employees purchased Shady Acre. It was then sold to the present owners in 1965. Glasshouses were built in 1970 and the owners then lived on the property in a mobile home for 5 years until they obtained planning permission to build the bungalow that stands on the site today. It was developed and run as a successful plant nursery, until 1998 when the owners retired. Since then the glasshouses have been removed and the site has been re-landscaped to form a large garden.

[Adapted from Anthony R. Brooks (2008) The Changing Times of Fulking & Edburton. Chichester: RPM Print & Design, pages 85-86.]

Update 16th January: the road remains open, all contractor detritus removed.

Month: January 2017